Tag: ruby

Javascript grows in popularity

Posted on February 5, 2015 by - News

JavascriptAccording to numbers from RedMonk, a tech-industry analyst firm, while Apple’s development language Swift is growing it has a mountain to climb before it will rival the ever popular Javascript.

The tame Apple Press is doing its best to talk up the rise of Swift, but the real news from RedMonk’s list of the most-used languages survey is that Javascript is continuing to grow like topsy. Swift has risen from obscuring to one of the top 22 languages but given that is two spots below an OS called “groovy” we don’t think it is making that much of a splash.

The top ten are

  1. JavaScript
  2. Java
  3. PHP
  4. Python
  5. C#
  6. C++
  7. Ruby
  8. CSS
  9. C
  10. Objective-C

JavaScript edged Java for the top spot in the rankings, but as always, the difference between the two is so marginal as to be insignificant.

The Top 10 was effectively static. C++ and Ruby jumped each one spot to split fifth place with C#, but that minimal distinction reflects the lack of movement of the rest of the “Tier 1,” or top grouping of languages.

PHP has not shown the ability to unseat either Java or JavaScript, but it has remained unassailable for its part in the third position. After a brief drop in Q1 of 2014, Python has been stable in the fourth spot, and the rest of the Top 10 looks much as it has for several quarters.

In fact rather than Swift, Red Monk predicts that Go is doing the best.  Six months ago it was predicted that it would become a Top 20 language within six to twelve months. Six months following that, Go can consider that mission accomplished. Go jumped over Visual Basic, Clojure and Groovyand displaces Coffeescript entirely – to take number 17 on the list.

Red Monk said that Julia and Rust are the two notable languages to watch, Julia and Rust’s growth has typically been in lockstep, though not for any particular functional reason. This time Rust outpaced Julia, jumping eight spots to 50 against Julia’s more steady progression from 57 to 56.

 

Ruby on Rails is dying

Posted on November 26, 2014 by - News

damsel-in-distress-4Ruby on Rails is dying off, despite the fact that those with the skill can make a killing according to a new report from Quartz.

Quartz found that by using US job listing data collected by Burning Glass and the Brookings Institution, and dividing by its shoe size,the most valuable programming skill to have today is Ruby on Rails. If you have the skill you can take home an average salary of $109,460.

But other data indicates that Rails (and Ruby) usage is not trending upwards.

Quartz homed in on the demand for workers with programming-specific skills and based it all on a large data set which was nearly two years old. Phil Johnson at ITworld had a look at some other figures collected by MS Gooroo, which has collected data from over 300,000 job listings in the US, UK and Australia.

While this confirmed that Ruby on Rails experts were still getting paid a bomb, The percentage of US job listings mentioning Rails in July 2014 was 1.1 percent, which was down from 1.8 percent in December 2013, an almost 40 percent drop. While the pay for Rails engineers is high, demand over the last year seems to be dropping.

Rails is a framework, and not a programming language, but Ruby is the language upon which Rails was built. The most recent TIOBE index of programming language popularity, which is based on web searches for languages, from this month, Ruby was ranked 14th, down from 13th in November 2013 and 11th in January 2013.

Another PYPL index of programming languages, which ranks languages based on searches for web tutorials about them, ranked Ruby 10th, the same spot it held one year ago and down slightly from January, 2013 when it ranked 9th.

It looks like demand by U.S. employers for engineers with Rails skills, however, has been on the decline, at least for the last year.

If use of the Ruby programming language itself can be considered a reliable proxy for the use of Rails, its use by engineers has also been dropping at least moderately since the beginning of 2013.