

The Death of Software Development (in North America at least) - nickb
http://paranoid-engineering.blogspot.com/2008/06/death-of-software-development.html

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bsaunder
I think it's less of a death and more of a maturing. Early on in technological
cycles, things seem to be rather inefficient and require more resources than
when they mature. I think there is other evidence of improved efficiency in
software development.

Combine that with the .com bust and the current non-recession that we are now
not in, and I think many people have left the profession (for a variety of
reasons). This lines up with the recent reports of a drop in CS majors in US
colleges.

Ultimately, it's less about Java, .Net,open source and blub and more about
what you do with the technology.

That's part of what attracts me to HN. People here are more focused on getting
things done, and not religious wars on programming languages (the requisite
weekly Lisp posts ;).

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mechanical_fish
On the original page, commenter Kim has a hypothesis:

 _Essentially, all results from Google Trends are normalized.... More and more
non-technical people are using google and thus the percentage of searches for
programming declines._

Sounds reasonable to me. These graphs don't even have units on the Y axis.
They're useless without some idea of what they're measuring: absolute or
relative numbers?

Somebody needs to read _How to Lie With Statistics_.

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donal
Hmm, I wish there was aggregation for search trends, I'm curious to see
Baidu's statistics.

I'm a little surprised by the comments lambasting the lack of China's presence
in the stats. Google isn't the dominant player in the Chinese search market
and I don't think there is an entrenched competitor in the Indian market, so
of course the results are going to be skewed.

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airhadoken
one of the commenters on the article brings up a good point. What are the
statistics like for "apache", "spring framework", and "orm"?

~~~
bsaunder
check for yourself at trends.google.com apache and spring framwork are
trending down, orm is mostly level

