ahlawat.net

Its not news that dynamically typed languages are hot. With Google churning out one application after another with unbelievable javascript kung fu, projects like bespin and frameworks like rails and django becoming hugely popular it’s interesting to see where the future of programming is going.

I have been programming in java, but the language is weak. Its unbelievable the level of productivity you can achieve with ruby or python. I still argue with people at work about java - the JVM is a wonderful platform but java is just a programming language for this platform, in a few years from now you will only see people using scala or groovy because you would probably be able to write the same code in 1/5th the time with 1/5th the amount of code.

Its interesting to note that the industry trends seem to agree -

Here is a graph of the number of job postings with the words java, c# etc. The results are not shocking, java is the king of the hill, c# is probably around half as popular with python, groovy and ruby at the bottom.

Job Count

But if you take a look at the first differential and consider where the jobs are growing - its very interesting. Ruby and Groovy are exploding whereas java and c# are actually dipping.

Job growth per language

The same story with frameworks - if you consider, django, ruby on rails, grails, EJB3 etc. and compare them - the monolithic server side frameworks are slipping in popularity whereas the dynamic frameworks are rising up.

Jobs per framework

Framework Growth

One can make what they will of these frameworks but it seems like dynamic languages and tools are gaining popularity and will probably dominate newer development. With more and more enterprises opening up to these frameworks it might get easier to answer someone who puts an argument - “but it’s not object oriented … “. You can point him to this link and say - it’s better, its dynamically object oriented with functional thrown into the mix.

Is this the death of statically typed languages - you be the judge.