

Programming Languages to watch in 2011 - mcgin
http://java.dzone.com/news/9-programming-languages-watch

======
thomas11
Scheme is _second_ in jobs on indeed.com, and the author doesn't realize that
his search is off?

Erlang could become "the next Python"?

What a shoddy article.

Edit: I realize that Scheme is second only among the nine niche languages.
It's still bogus, as a simple search for scheme on indeed.com shows.

~~~
tocomment
What did he do wrong?

~~~
burgerbrain
Scheme is a niche language, and it's niche is education. It's almost _never_
used in industry because it lacks a single popular standard library adds
enough functionality to make it practical to use in the real world. In
general, you don't write a practical scheme application, you write a practical
[insert implementation]-scheme application.

------
khill
Why would I choose any language which runs on the JVM now that Oracle is
flexing its muscles? As much as I like Clojure, Scala and Groovy, I'm starting
to steer clear of anything related to Oracle's intellectual properties.

~~~
brlewis
I'm not concerned. IBM has an independent implementation, so copyright is not
an issue. Oracle is not about to start a patent war with IBM, so patents are
actually less of an issue than they usually are with software. The trademark
issue is trivial. I'm not concerned about Oracle's IP.

~~~
ovi256
"I'm not concerned about Oracle's IP." - famous last words.

~~~
junkbit
Oracle owns the trademark to JavaScript now too. We are going to have to call
it ECMAScript to be safe.

------
timrobinson
The article compares languages based on numbers of job postings. Quality of
jobs != quantity of jobs.

~~~
raganwald
Agreed!

One _possible_ explanation for the number of job postings for Actionscript is
that the culture around doing Flash animations is one where there is high
turnover. Thus there are lots of open jobs at any one time.

Another possible explanation is that there is a culture of paying people very
little for full time jobs but overpaying agencies (who also pay little). As a
result, companies are constantly hoping to hire someone at a bargain but
rarely finding anyone willing to work long hours for low wages, and they are
forced to go to agencies for their needs.

I don't know if either explanation is true, of course, but I do know that I'd
look into a lot more than a single cherry-picked statistic before deciding I
wanted to learn a new programming language.

~~~
timrobinson
I wonder if a more useful comparison would be salary (or rate of change of
salary over time).

I started learning functional programming over Christmas 2008 for two reasons:

\- Mainly because it looked fun, and very different from what I'd done before

\- Although I had no idea whether F# or Haskell jobs would come up, I knew
that if they did come up, they'd be just right for me

~~~
thomas11
So, did any jobs come up? Looking at your blog, you seem to be have been
pretty involved in F# until May.

~~~
timrobinson
An F# job did come up, and I'm quite happy with it :)

I'd like to be more involved in the functional programming community; it's
easy to dip in and out of Twitter and forum discussions, but blogging is one
thing that's dropped off since the summer.

------
Kilimanjaro
According to that graph actionscript got stopped on its tracks the day Steve
Jobs started the war against flash.

------
nightlifelover
Agree with R, but certainly not with Go (not even google is dedicated to make
this the next big language, they call it an "experiment") ActionScript is
Flash, right?! I would say JavaScript..

And Scala and Scheme? Maybe some academics use that, but I don't know a
business which relies on it.

~~~
pashields
A number of web startups are using scala for their apps, most notably
foursquare. I wouldn't dismiss it as academic when the big push I am seeing
for it is for use with lift (scala webapp framework).

~~~
GeneralMaximus
Last time I tried it, getting started with Lift was a convoluted process.
Scala is a nice language but, IMO, it needs to rid itself of dependencies on
Java tools like Maven and Eclipse if it wants to get anywhere.

sbaz is nice. More sbaz everywhere would be nicer. It's one of the best
language-specific package managers I've used.

------
hendler
Why no javascript? Seems like an obvious language to watch in terms of
popularity, job market, and interesting progress.

~~~
Periodic
JavaScript isn't really up-and-coming. It's been in mainstream use in browsers
for a long (in internet years) time now. There may be a lot of emerging
enthusiasm around JavaScript for non-browser programming such as with node.js,
but it's going to be swamped by the demand for JavaScript developers in
general.

------
tjarratt
This is a really odd way to approach programming languages, I feel. According
to the article, none of these are very mainstream languages (although
certainly scheme and clojure have their adherents, and LUA is used extensively
in the game industry), but they should be watched because of hiring trends?

I'd much rather pick up a language because it has some interesting features,
or because it solves a problem I have with one of the languages I already
know. Seems they're missing the forest for the trees, somehow.

------
lallysingh
Whew! Haskell's not on the list.

