24/05/2008
Java going down, Python way up, and more …
According to O’Reilly Radar, sales of Java books have declined in the last 4 years by almost 50%. C# is selling more books from year to year and will probably level up with Java in 2008. Javascript is on the rise (due to AJAX, for sure) and PHP is on a surprising decrease path (although the job statistics indicate quite the contrary).
In 2007, the number of sold Ruby books was larger than the number of Python books. In their article they qualify Ruby as being a “mid-major programming language” and Python as “mid-minor programming language”. However, after the announcement of Google App Engine the number of Python downloads from ActiveState has tripled in May. This should become visible in the book sales statistics, pretty soon.
Tags: book, Google, Java, programming, python, Ruby
I wrote one year ago about the O’Reilly book sale fallacy
http://stephan.reposita.org/archives/2007/05/24/books-as-a-success-indicator/
“So what O’Reilly really says is that they have interesting books for PHP and C#, but less interesting books for Java, Javascript and Python.”
Nothing has changed since then.
Peace
-stephan
There are many sources to learn Java. I have heard that Python (when compared to Java, PHP etc) has few online tutorials and so that could be the reason for the demand.
C# has many forms - pure C#, ADO.NET, ASP.NET etc. In case of Java there are god amount of online tutorials/documentation for the many Java frameworks.
The stats is in line with my expectations.
Up to about 2 or 3 years ago I was buying plenty of Java books, and would often look for an appropriate book when getting into anything new. Since then I’ve bought the odd book on Ruby, Javascript, Ajax, but maybe only one or two on Java. But I’m still mainly working in Java. It’s just that books aren’t as important to me as they were.
The books just aren’t good enough quickly enough to keep up with the technology anymore, and online info/blogs/searching has improved to the point where it’s generally more effective for me. So the few books I do buy tend to be for late-night just-for-interest reading about things I’m not actually doing. If anything my own book-buying tends to indicate the exact opposite of which technologies I’m learning.
Thus the stats may be true about books sales, but don’t necessarily mean anything with respect to technology trends.
Anybody saw the latest stats on jobs from dice.com ? It appears that Java indeed is on a downward trend. Can’t find the link, there were some VERY interesting charts there …
Indeed.com doesn’t look too worrisome:
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=java%2C+c%23%2C+javascript%2C+python%2C+actionscript&l=
No growth, but no decline either.
@Gargi “I have heard that Python (when compared to Java, PHP etc) ”
That may be right in terms of numbers, but when it comes to quality Python has some really excellent online resources: Mark Pilgrim’s “Dive into Python” (http://www.diveintopython.org/), the Python Cookbook (http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Python/Cookbook/) or the online documentation on the official website (http://python.org/doc/), which I, for one, have found very good. And there’s the also the mailing list (http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/topics) which I’ve heard is more newby-friendly compared to other programming communities.
Ahh, the smell of language wars in the afternoon.
And yet, those statistics are worthless. The question is “is Java getting more unpopular, now that the books sold by O’Reilly are going down?”. From Probabilistics 101 we have conditional probabilities …
P(unpopular|books sales dw) =
P(unpopular * book sales down) / P(book sales down)
But the trouble is that the two events MAY be independent of each other, and that could mean that …
P(unpopular|books sales dw) = P(unpopular)
This can be solved elegantly with the Bayes theorem, which would need the answer to this question … “how many times was the O’Reilly Radar right before?”
But I have a hutch that Java is mature enough that it doesn’t generate book sales anymore. And it won’t be replaced by Python or Ruby because it has different use cases (which happen to overlap).
Cobol is also pretty mature, given that it generates very weak book sales
but yes I do agree that a correlation between O’Reilly figures and technology status is not necessarily a strong one.
My hunch is that the book sales is relevant metrics - a decrease means less learners, less “new entrants”. Probably Java is preparing for a smooth landing in the coming years. Which doesn’t necessarily mean it will be “replaced” with PHP/Python/Ruby. Internet is the fastest growing area in software today, and Java isn’t even considered in most of the cases.
But I think there’s still a chance for Java expansion in the mobile world.