zsombor's lair

Got to love the new trend tool from Google. With a clear simple interface, gives you access to all nifty statistics about search keyword volume. The value might not be obvious on first site, well at least it wasn’t for me, but it definitely pays of the time spent experimenting.

Technical person as I’m first tried some programming language searches. The O’Reilly radar already published interesting trends about the computer book market so why not put these to the test.

A quick search for: for JavaIt is confirmed Java appears to loose ground. The slowly fading but still enterprisy J2EE: enterprisy J2EE while speaking about enterprise .Net looks stable.

The generally frowned upon, ‘wont scale’ PHP appears somewhat decreasing.

Subversive Ruby base for the much hyped Ruby On Rails framework seems slowly ascending. Probably the term ‘ruby’ is just too general for now and we see more noise than our bellowed language. Google associates news titles to the keyword and they look mostly unrelated. Ruby On Rails has much better name with less false positives: steep and radical growth , unfortunately such rate has its own side effects but solutions exist.

All of them charted in one graph for comparison. Java dominates, followed by PHP, then .Net with J2ee and Rails looking like insignificant dwarfs. Just to see how small Rails is compare it the the once dominant “business” language COBOL or to Lisp an unjustly neglected language.

So where should You invest in your knowledge portfolio. Certainly not Java, I would rather take any other blip on the radar screen. You see these trend maps cannot be read just as market need, rather simply the number of players in each market, that is greater competition. My advice is simple chose what you love, since you’ll not stand a chance otherwise against those who do.

For a better career advice you should read Chad Fowler’s enlightened book. One interesting theory from it is that a western developer can compete on the global market by explicitly searching for lesser known, but higher yield fields. Oversimplified this goes like this: since there are insignificantly few Lisp, Python, Ruby, Smalltalk, (...) developers in India, you will not have compete against their lower rates.

BTW Google trends has nice feature of showing top cities, regions and languages for a given keyword. Do mind that these are normalized but even like this should put some perspective on the strong competition at lower rates from main outsourcing destinations. Of course all mainstream languages have strong comparative foothold in India. Even previously fashionable ones like COBOL. In the end languages are commodities, basing your future solely on them is less than advisable.

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Posted a small update here.