I recently started using C#, having not programmed for windows in years, and have to admit I'm greatly impressed by it. It really feels modern, well designed, and very flexible and powerful, in too many ways to list.<p>Unfortunately, I'm finding the .NET libraries that I'm using not quite so well designed - Working with windows forms specifically. Fortunately, a lot of the third party libraries seem pretty well designed, though seems to be a general love-affair with overly verbose XML configuration files. Perhaps I'm just spoilt by the elegance of UIKit (well, most of it), and the clear benefits from a ground-up design.<p>I know there is Mono for other platforms, but don't know how well it is supported/what the performance characteristics are like, but it seems a language that would really, really benefit with a truly platform-independent (i.e. not a thin win32 wrapper) set of libraries; GUI and otherwise.
I don't think I can agree that "{{language}} tutorial" as a measure of "growth" is valid. When I am looking to learn a language, I don't Google for tutorials because you end up with mostly worthless information and maybe a single result that has any value -- and 9 times of 10 that result is on the website of the language, so my query becomes "{{language}}". Further, as I'm learning a language, I'm more likely to Google for a language or API reference than I am for tutorials on how to do particular tasks X, Y, and Z. That leads me to write queries like "mdn {{some DOM/HTML/JS/CSS thing}}", which oddly enough, are also the same kinds of queries I write when using a language I'm entirely proficient with.<p>So in that case, I don't think a general "{{language}} tutorial" accurately represents the growth of a language. Perhaps interest, but this isn't limited to programmers, either, which makes me feel like it's even more misleading. For instance, the only time I entered "python tutorial" into Google was when I wanted to see a quick few basic programs to get an idea of whether or not I'd like the language. I don't really use Python personally (<rant>never will, it's terrible</rant>), but I've hacked around in it at work, and I never once used "python tutorial" to get my work done. I think one was "python reference urllib" which took me directly to the python reference page for urllib.
Isn't the title a bit misleading? According to the chart, Java is the most popular language of the year (and the decade, if you take a look at <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/pydatalog/pypl/PyPL-PopularitY-of-Programming-Language" rel="nofollow">https://sites.google.com/site/pydatalog/pypl/PyPL-PopularitY...</a>).
In addition I would like to point out that according to TIOBE C is the number one language of the year and C# dropped a place. <a href="http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....</a>
It all depends on the definition of popular. This is not to be confused with widely used.<p>Much more interesting (and catching the Zeitgeist) metric will be:<p>"Languages (and tools) the top 5% developers prefer to use when left on their own"<p>From anecdotal evidence Python is indeed somewhat high ranked there.
Quite deservedly so, you can't argue with statistics!<p>Anyway, I saw something interesting in the graph. If you just look at C and C#, then in 2011 you notice that where C made a sharp decline, C# made an almost equally sharp incline.<p>Are these movements correlated? What happened in 2011 that made a bunch of wannabe (since they look for C tutorial) C programmers suddenly turn to wannabe C# programmers?<p>I realise it may very well be two randomly occuring uncorrelated events that causes these jumps. But I'm very much interested in what kinds of events move the worldwide interest in programming languages.
Far more interesting than the language itself is the "Regional Interest" for the different terms on the Google Trends site:<p><a href="http://www.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US#q=Java%20tutorial%2C%20PHP%20tutorial%2C%20Tutorial%20C%2B%2B%2C%20C%23%20tutorial%2C%20c%20tutorial&date=today%2012-m&cmpt=q" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US#q=Java%20tutor...</a><p>India is far ahead of every other country for all of these tutorial searches. eg for Java, India is search index 100, while USA is only search index 11.
I'm not sure why people don't also look at job sites to see language popularity. I quickly compared a few languages here <a href="http://www.zappable.com/2012/12/job-market-for-programming-languages/" rel="nofollow">http://www.zappable.com/2012/12/job-market-for-programming-l...</a> but one could do a more in-depth analysis.<p>I created a chart with some more languages in this Google Doc: <a href="http://bit.ly/UBuI02" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/UBuI02</a>. Java seems to be by far the most popular, though C# seems to be pretty high-demand too.<p>One could probably compare different job sites to see why they have somewhat different rankings. Also, I wasn't sure how to search for C (and even C++) without getting C# results too.
I don't understand how searches for '{language} tutorial' is a better metric than TIOBEs. The results of a metric like that would likely under-represents Objective-C in particular, because Objective-C classes are namespaced with the NS prefix and don't require additional search terms. For example, to find code for doing string reversal in C#, I'd need to search for 'C# String Reversal Tutorial' but for Objective-C, I could just search for 'Reverse NSString'.
From the #code2012 poll on twitter C# is 8th where it was last year: <a href="http://www.ioncannon.net/projects/code2012/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ioncannon.net/projects/code2012/</a> Not that it is any better a stat than Google searches but the number one language from the poll was Javascript and I tend to think that from a use standpoint that is probably "the language of the year" if there is one.
This is misleading simply for the fact that java and python are taught heavily in college over php, college students that need extra assistance will "google" tutorials, php is not taught in many colleges, if you add wordpress tutorials, drupal tutorials, and joomla tutorials to the mix you will see a totally different picture