Programming Languages Trend: Groovy Developers Wanted !

To make valuable decisions as a technologist, I need to constantly be aware of factors that may influence business and continually consider and evaluate trends.
Today I have used SimplyHired search trend service to do some quick "low cost" research (well suited approach considering the current crisis!) to grasp where the evolution of programming languages is heading.

While Java & C++ continue to be the most demanded and generic used languages, with the exception of Objective C (and we all know why!), scripting and web related languages have seen a major increase of demand. According to these results, Groovy is in high demand with an increase of 501% since Jul 1, 2007 !!!

In some of my projects, we have been successfully adopting Groovy and many of my colleagues have became big fans. However, it was still a surprise for me to see the following result! Please check it for yourself...

This graph displays the percentage of jobs with the search terms below anywhere in the job listing. Since July 2007, the following has occurred.

- Groovy jobs increased 501%
- Objective C jobs increased 106%
- Ruby jobs increased 69%
- Actionscript jobs increased 46%
- Python jobs increased 32%
- PHP jobs increased 30%
- Lua jobs increased 6%
- Javascript jobs did not change
- C++ jobs decreased 8%
- C jobs decreased 9%
- C# jobs decreased 11%
- Java jobs decreased 12%
- Perl jobs decreased 15%
- Visual Basic jobs decreased 35%
- Delphi jobs decreased 63%

If you want to run directly the search and see the latest trends from SimplyHired click here

An additional 5 minutes provided the following information about trends for some web related frameworks.

Although Ajax is clearly the most popular technology used, unless Microsoft and Adobe are posting the jobs themselves to improve the trend ;-) There is definitely a steep increase demand for WPF & Adobe Flex jobs.



- WPF jobs increased 256%
- Adobe Flex jobs increased 212%
- Ruby On Rails jobs increased 118%
- Ajax jobs increased 41%
- Coldfusion jobs increased 40%

If you want to run directly the latest search result click here

My findings in this quick review provide a rough idea, and with more time, I would be interested to compare to more accurate scientific results that take into account diverse geographical trends, include additional languages, and perhaps categorize the languages differently. However, the 30 minutes I spent using the search tool SimplyHired provided some interesting results!

Apologies in advance for any miscalculation. Please feel free to comment, give feedback or link additional research to this page. After all, this is the beauty of the web: fast results at low cost and collaborative !

If interested, here some more related links I came across during a quick google search:
- List of programming languages
- Programming Language Trends from Caffeinated Coder
- The future of programming languages (as at Jan 2008!)
- TIOBE Programming Community Index