The 20 Most Popular Programming Languages

Any kid has the chance to succeed at school in their teen years, but it becomes a whole lot easier if you’re not worried about getting shoved into lockers, being picked on or having your lunch money pilfered.  Being accepted and getting in with a good crowd takes a huge amount of pressure.  It opens new doors, exposes exciting new possibilities, gives you support and helps get you through the tough times.  Every kid wants to be liked, respected and feel safe.

Picking the right programming language has many similarities.  It’s a popularity contest.

When it comes to choosing the programming language your team, projects, organization and clients will be depending on to deliver solutions today, and the building blocks for the years to come, you want to makes sure the community is there to support you.  Usually when people think of the community, they think of blogs, wiki, source code repositories, forums and language specific sites.  And that’s important.

What’s also important is the pool of people that actually program in the language.  This is the potential pool of candidates you’ll be pulling from when you grow or have churn.  It also indicates its use in real-world solutions.  The amount of training available for it will also be a key data point.  Any programmer worth their salt needs to be able to dig through the web and self-train themselves as they grow.  But live training is the best way to get programmers over the wall to that next level.

And you will want to make sure that there are enough vendor options out there that can provide solutions and services on your programming platform.  These will be the folks you call in to fill critical needs and those you work closely with.

So what programming languages are most “popular”?  Tiobe Software has been measuring the popularity of programming languages since 2001 and they put out a monthly index.  This month’s rankings look like this…

Tiobe Index for June 2010

The information provided is a good data point.  If you are looking at changing direction with your current language, or you’re starting from scratch, this is a good place to go if you have a couple options you are investigating.

However, having said all that, this index is a data point and it’s probably not the strongest one you will use.  You need to choose the right language for the job at hand as well as the direction you’re going.  There are plenty of other, stronger, points to keep in mind:

• The type of programming you’re doing
• The kind of solutions your client’s need
• How you expect to staff your team
• Platform and skill sets that are prevalent in your organization
• The skill sets, background, dynamics and programming mindset of your team
• The organization’s culture
• The organization’s standard operating procedures
• Existing vendor/project pipelines
• Long-term strategy for the organization, department and, therefore, team

So if you go through the above bullet points and choose a language that’s not in the top 5, or even the top 10, you will still be in good shape if you’ve done your due diligence.

Gartner’s Business Intelligence Outlook for 2010

Some of the big takeaways from GeoJan’s highlights of the Gartner’s predictions for BI in 2010:

• Compound growth rate for BI platforms through 2013 will be 6.3%.
• Momentum grows in the shift from a central core of report authors to empowering users to analyze the data themselves to get the answers they really need.
• SAP and IBM (Cognos) customers are loosing patience. Attributed to these companies still being in the midst of the transition pains that come from acquisition.
• All those Challengers in the BI space were Visionaries the year before and that’s good.  Their innovation is driving better product development choices from the Leaders of the quadrant.
• The goal to consolidate to one enterprise BI platform is still a talking point at a lot of organizations.  The difficult economy and the need for better, faster competitive intelligence open the doors for the pure-play vendors to slip into the same organizations where the megavendors have setup shop.
• (Reading between the lines)  A growing challenge will be how to manage all the intelligence evolving on the network shares and desktops with the growth of these light-weight, pure-play BI tools.

Below is the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence.  Are you seeing these trends taking shape where you are?

Source: GeoJan

Google Buys Sword Swallower

Over at the TED Blog there’s this post which talks about Google’s acquisition of the Trendalyzer software developed by the guy snacking on steel in the photo above.  Looks like they bought both the statistical talent and the great visualization tool.  When you get a chance, check out some of the great visual applications over at Gapminder.org. 

Fail Like Edison

Over at O’Reilly Radar Tim O’Reilly wrote about today’s NYT article on Thomas Edison’s early failures in marketing the phonograph. What struck me was the photo that Tim linked in his post. We’ve all had days like this in the projects we’re working on (heck, you may be having that day right now)…

It doesn’t matter what the focus of the project you are working on is, you are doing something new with technology and you are working with people – things are going to go wrong at some point. The question isn’t if it’s when. Your perspective on those setbacks will shape how you deal with them.

While Edison was a phenominal success as an inventor, he failed quite a bit. His outlook is what carried him beyond cashing in, settling for could-have-been. Some of my favorite quotes by Edison:

“Many of life’s failures are experienced by people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

“Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do in the first place doesn’t mean it’s useless…. “

“If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is often a step forward….”

So when you hit one of those walls stay positive, identify the problem instead of the symptom, think solutions not excuses and always assume success.