Programming Languages, O’Reilly & The State Of Java

Ivan Moscoso, Monday, March 17, 2008 @ 9:26 pm

There are some interesting charts for the State of the Computer Book Market at of O'Reilly, viewing popularity of programming languages based on book sales for 2007. No surprise here: Java seems to be in decline, and Ruby on the rise.

This is obviously good news on the Ruby front, but I begin to wonder about the rest of the story-- who these readers are, and how many of them might have come from a Java background and how that has affects sales of Java books. The article seems to dichotomize C# & Java, but I don't believe that's a very fair comparison..

Interesting tidbits:

At the rate it is going, [C#] should surpass Java as the number one language this year as it is only (9,526) units short and is on a positive 18.85% growth rate while Java continues its slide at a (14.16%) clip.

The noticeable trend with the mid-minor languages is that Groovy came from nowhere and has now sold 1500 copies in the first quarter of 2007.

Now who are the developers you suppose are buying those Groovy books? A fair number of Java developers, no doubt. And ones who are beginning to dabble more in dynamic languages. Expect that number to grow considerably in 2008. So let's continue..

Ruby was a small box last year and is now 8 largest language passing Perl and Python and is now knocking on the door for Visual Basic's spot. Ruby has the second largest unit growth after C# and went from 4% overall market share to 5% and is 4k units off of displacing VB for #7 overall.

All this speculation on my part is not to suggest that somehow the sales of C# and .NET books are in competition with, say, Java/Groovy + Ruby (i.e. my goal here is not to replace one false dichotomy with another), only that I feel these numbers suggest a different correlation (presuming that on average, each developer contributes the same number of book purchases per year).

Many in the Java community have worked to achieve at least baseline literacy level in Ruby/Rails (even if they haven't completely jumped ship). Oddly enough, both Ruby on Rails (and JRuby in particular) are popular side-topics at Java conferences, so while the numbers above are interesting, I feel there are several ways of grouping the book sales together in order to get a better picture of where a large portion of the Java demographic is shifting.

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Comments: 7 so far

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1. 

   I am a Java developer, I don’t purchase books anymore. I’m on mailing lists for all the projects I use; and I read the Java site/blog for updates on the language.
   Now programming languages are the new console wars?

   Comment by George Frick, Tuesday, March 18, 2008 @ 8:30 am

2. 

   Good point, George. The last two Java books I recall purchasing were Spring In Action, and Java Persistence With Hibernate. These books always prove to be great reference, not only for myself but others I’m working with who might not have them.

   As far as other topics in the Java space, like you I tend to avoid books when online references seem to be plentiful. Still, there is the occasional exception.

   Comment by Ivan Moscoso, Tuesday, March 18, 2008 @ 3:30 pm

3. 

   I am a Java developer and did not buy a Java book for years. Funny, though, that I bought a Ruby / RoR book. More fun: I never wanted to program Ruby, I just was curious whats it all about. And the punchline: I read the book nearly completely but I have no intention to change. I even did not install or test Ruby.

   Question: How did I change the statics and would that change be valid for your conclusions?

   Comment by Georgi, Wednesday, March 19, 2008 @ 10:10 am

4. 

   Word on the street is that Ruby is officially dead. There was a bozo in my office that was pushing Ruby. Later we found out he was mistakenly hired. He had never programmed before and could not type. He did not understand Java. Claimed he wrote a book. After that I just figured everyone who likes Ruby is a nut case. Now that Ruby is dead, I was right all along.

   Comment by JavaTek, Wednesday, March 19, 2008 @ 12:31 pm

5. 

   dice.com 94K tek jobs total
   16,532 Java jobs
   742 Ruby Jobs

   With the stats listed above, people are learning Ruby, buying books but there is very minimal demand out in the real world. Java is still King . You can go anywhere and find a high paying Java job right now. For now I will follow the money and use my time, effort and resources wisely until it pays to do otherwise.

   All of yalls go out and learn Ruby while I take the higher paying Java job in your state because of depth of knowledge.

   Comment by JavaTek, Wednesday, March 19, 2008 @ 1:01 pm

6. 

   “Word on the street is that Ruby is officially dead. There was a bozo in my office that was pushing Ruby. Later we found out he was mistakenly hired. He had never programmed before and could not type. He did not understand Java. Claimed he wrote a book. After that I just figured everyone who likes Ruby is a nut case. Now that Ruby is dead, I was right all along.”

   What the hell - I hope your kidding. If not, your company seriously needs to review it’s hiring process. Also, it’s not cool to be an asshat just because Ruby or Java or Lisp is not your choice of technologies.

   Ruby is far from dead and is even being embraced in many corporate environments (1). Considering there are interpreters being sponsored and written for Java, .NET, and even a sponsored alternative to the MRI, we will be with Ruby for a long time to come.

   By the way, I’m a Java developer right now.

   (1) http://workingwithrails.com/high-profile-organisations

   Comment by Mikkel G., Wednesday, March 19, 2008 @ 5:36 pm

7. 

   Ruby is nice and dandy. my co worker did some script tricks to do some text-file parsing. i said ok, thats fine. he is cool. now he is leaving and why do i have to learn ruby to fix the code left behind? i would prefer using java instead, no matter how painful. or at best Groovy.. Next time the young enthusiastic dude tries to push his fancy language to our throats i will be the first to stop him.

   Comment by teh, Thursday, March 20, 2008 @ 1:40 pm

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