As soon as I saw the Evans Data: Perl, PHP, and Python use drops off in EMEA study, I thought it smelled bad.
I can’t say that I have studied their methodology for running this survey, but it goes against all of the evidence that I see in my world.
My current thoughts are:
- Java is on solid ground. There is a lot of work on this platform and it is growing.
- PHP is productive, and I am seeing more and more applications using it (in the enterprise, not just script kiddies)
- Rails: We all know the buzz that has come around Rails. Although everyone hasn’t quit their day job, and that it is still in early adopt mode, you can’t argue that it isn’t growing at a huge rate. I know many projects where we are able to be guinea pigs showing them what Rails can do in a real application.
- .NET is very strong on that platform and is growing
Partly it sometimes feels like the job surveys. “Bush creates 5 new jobs!” (subtext: we imported 500k workers into the economy, and more people are working 2 jobs these days).
A lot of these worlds are growing, and we are better for it.
Scripting languages in general are doing really well right now, ESPECIALLY when you can run some on platforms such as the JVM and CLR :)