P-Languages on the Wane?
By Ryan Tomayko under Then they fight you... on 04. August 2005Hot on the heels of O’Reilly’s report of strong demand for dynamic languages we have The Register reporting that Perl, PHP, and Python are on some kind of massive wane:
PHP and Python have each experienced a 25 per cent drop in the last 12 months while Perl fell 20 per cent. Those not planning to evaluate or use either of the three in future projects, meanwhile, is growing - up by as much as 40 per cent in the case of PHP.
The Reg goes on to predict folly for IBM, Oracle, SAP, and Intel - each of which has thrown support behind PHP.
EDC blamed the drop on a failure for PHP, along with Perl and Python, to penetrate the enterprise space. An EDC spokesman predicted that the decline could be halted and reversed with this year’s work between Zend and its new backers.
Hmmm.. I’m not very satisfied with the response they got from Zend, either:
Disputing EDC’s numbers, though, Zend said that its backing from IBM, Oracle, Intel and SAP proved that PHP is a growing market and that these companies have accurately read developer trends.
This argument is crap - backing from large corporations proves nothing about developer trends.
EDS’ sample seems a bit narrow. They polled 400 developers in small, medium and large enterprises
across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA)
.
This goes strongly against much of what I’ve been observing over the past year. Where are we to assume these huge percentages of developers going? Java? .NET? I don’t buy it.
Or is this some kind of massive migration to Ruby? ;)
Ryan Tomayko:
The Reg just doubled up with Is the web’s love affair with PHP over?. This time they’re pointing the folly at the recent crop of LAMP startups:
comment at 04. August 2005
Lorenzo Gatti:
Statistics must be taken with a grain of salt, more so when the sample is undocumented: the “400 developers” might be writing downloadable cellphone trinkets, embedded control systems, Excel or Access “applications”, DirectX or OpenGL shaders, anything for z/OS or older mainframe environments, JDBC drivers, console games, and countless other kinds of software where language choice is limited or nonexistent.
I’d rather trust direct interest metrics like downloads and page views, mailing list volume, revenue of relevant companies.
comment at 05. August 2005
Harry Fuecks:
Someone’s gotta call horseshit.
It’s a shame The Register jumped on the story which is not a big step from “We surveyed 5 people on a bus and guess what?!? P* languages are in decline”.
Some slightly more solid stats:
Also if you head to http://www.jobserve.com/ which is a UK based job search engine. I’ve always found it presents a pretty accurate picture of corporate demand for technologies. Listings are aged out quickly and are usually posted by specialist IT Job Agencies and usually represent a real requirement from a real business.
Back in Nov 2002, on a good day you’d see about 70-80 PHP jobs listed. Today it’s returning 271 jobs. Python is up from somewhere like 1-5 jobs back in 2002 to 84 right now. Perl I’ve never followed by right now there’s 929 jobs listed and Ruby’s putting in an appearance with 6. For reference Java has 3811 right now and C# - 1998, which helps convince me of the type of demand being reflected here.
In the end if this survey has got it right, the hidden story must be corporations cutting back in web development and imminent IT downturn.
comment at 05. August 2005
Chris Foster:
I second Harry’s “horseshit.” The stats are most likely compiled against responses from easy to find corporate/government trolls who are spoon fed .NET or legacy vendor Java solutions.
Take a look at craigslist.org. There was no Python market for me locally last year, but now there is a slow, but steady stream. And, PHP opportunities pile up daily.
comment at 05. August 2005
Ryan Tomayko:
Yea, I’m gonna third Harry’s horseshit. The Reg or EDC could have dug a little deeper to find supporting evidence for such a bold claim. Those kinds of drops don’t happen for no reason and you should see similarities between polls if they’re acurate.
comment at 05. August 2005
Bob Ippolito:
I certainly wouldn’t mind if the people so easily swayed by such nonsense would just go waste their time with C# and Java.
It’d certainly mean less competition for those of us running businesses built on agile languages… though, I guess the other side of the coin is that the unemployed überhackers that specialize in agile languages may have a harder time finding (boring) work.
comment at 06. August 2005
Fredrik:
My guess is that they use a narrow and badly controlled sample, leading to huge fluctuations. Remember, this is the same company that reported a 30% increase in MySQL use in only six months.
I wonder how many interviewed developers that Python number represents? If Python usage (in this survey) is below 70% of that of PHP, this drop in Python usage is not even a statistically significant change according to the numbers on Evans own (PHP-driven) website.
comment at 06. August 2005
Harry Fuecks:
Just for fun, some more lies and statistics thanks to alexa.com;
Traffic to python.org for the last year
Traffic to cpan.org for the last year
Traffic to php.net for the last year.
Traffic to ruby-lang.org and rubyforge.org for the last year.
They’re all say basically the same thing.
comment at 07. August 2005
duncan:
Cleary, it’s a fine piece of reporting by El Reg in the mold of ‘post something outrageous and watch the links roll in’ but I do think there’s a grain of truth in there somewhere.
I’d say that, on average, about half the people developing in the P-languages aren’t doing it to build the next Intel/SAP rival. They’re doing it to build the next Flickr or the next Moveable Type.
comment at 08. August 2005