The March 2003 issue of Talent Economy magazine (which is what Contract Professional morphed into) has an article titled "Are You Working With Endangered Languages?", which warns of the threat of using
"... a non-standard programming language because one of the main engineers like it without considering its supportability in the future."
The article has a nifty sidebar chart titled "Programming Community Index for February 2003", based on a Google-based ranking of languages based on job openings, books, and training courses. The chart shows Perl at position #4 (out of 20 shown), and moving up. (The chart also shows C# at #10, and moving up quickly.) The strong implication is that Perl is a mainstream choice, not an endangered language. (No news to us, but perhaps news to some managers.)

Validity of surveys like this aside, this type of article tends to be seen by non- or semi-technical people in influential positions who will probably pay more attention to the eye-catching chart than to the article. If you need to influence an influencer, show them the chart.

  • Comment on "Are You Working With Endangered Languages?"

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: "Are You Working With Endangered Languages?"
by Anonymous Monk on Apr 02, 2003 at 00:05 UTC

    First off, Their List is not at all a measure of language supportability, or anything more than:

    an indication of the popularity of programming languages.

    So how do they measure this? Well:

    The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors.

    This has massively favours corporate-backed languages (note Java's at the top). They judge "skilled engineers" by people that are certified. How many people here are "Perl Certified?" now compare that to how many people here are "skilled engineers." See where I'm going? Having a corporation backing a language is very, very different than having it be well supported.

    Perl is infinitely better supported than Java. Why? Because it's open. If Sun goes bankrupt or gets in extremely bad financial position and starts looking for any possible source of revenue, Java's in trouble, big trouble. I trust Sun as far as I can throw a Sun Fire 15k server, which isn't far. Perl doesn't have this problem (neither do a whole bunch of other languages mind you).

[reply]
      I trust Sun as far as I can throw a Sun Fire 15k server, which isn't far.

      Your throwing style must be askew. Those things don't weigh more than 50 or 60 pounds. All you have to do is get it balanced over one shoulder and use your hips in a twisty-type motion. I bet you could easily chuck one of them a good 10-12 feet. :-)

      ------
      We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

      Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.

      Please remember that I'm crufty and crochety. All opinions are purely mine and all code is untested, unless otherwise specified.

[reply]
[reply]

        Cool, mine's in the shop. Can I borrow yours? ;-D

[reply]
        As an alternative, see Caber, tossing...

        --hsm

        "Never try to teach a pig to sing...it wastes your time and it annoys the pig."
[reply]
Re: "Are You Working With Endangered Languages?"
by Cody Pendant (Prior) on Apr 02, 2003 at 01:39 UTC
    I think what lets the list down is its inclusion of HTML as a Programming Language...
    --
    “Every bit of code is either naturally related to the problem at hand, or else it's an accidental side effect of the fact that you happened to solve the problem using a digital computer.”
    M-J D
[reply]

      Then you've never seen the crazy things a modern web developer has to do. Programming is easy by comparison. Ugh.

[reply]
        I have seen, on a daily basis, the things a modern web developer has to do, because I am one!

        HTML really isn't a programming language. There's a lot of client-side programming involved in a lot of modern websites, but that's not HTML, by definition. It's DHTML, which is covered in their list under JavaScript.
        --

        “Every bit of code is either naturally related to the problem at hand, or else it's an accidental side effect of the fact that you happened to solve the problem using a digital computer.”
        M-J D
[reply]

      In case anyone was wondering...

      The only reason HTML doesn't count as a true programming language is it's lack of a looping facility. It requires that to be Turing complete (although I'd hate to see a device driver written in HTML!). It's certainly as convoluted as most other languages - although perhaps not Befunge.

      'I think the problem lies in the fact that your data doesn't fit my program'.

[reply]
        The only reason HTML doesn't count as a true programming language is...

        For purposes of the ranking, think of HTML as a specialized written language, rather than as a programming language. From a (non-technical) manager's point of view, HTML is a specialized technical language that its developers and maintainers need to buy books (and/or take training classes) to learn. It's also a specialized language that can become endangered, like SGML. That's the point of the article and the chart.

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Re: "Are You Working With Endangered Languages?"
by crenz (Priest) on Apr 02, 2003 at 17:54 UTC

    a Google-based ranking of languages based on job openings, books, and training courses

    That's a tad euphemistic. I always knew management is more based on hearsay than science ;-). Now I know why:

    Q: How are the TPCI ratings calculated?

    A: The Google search query doGoogleSearch('+"<language> programming" -tv')/10000 is used to calculate the TPC Index. This very simple algorithm appears to work quite well in practice. In order to professionalize the index further, there are thoughts to enhance the applied formula.

    (Source: the URL you cited)

    Let's put "PerlMonks -- the perl programming community" on every single page in the perlmonks mirror for google, and we should be able to make #1 easily :)

    (Actually, I think we should really do it.)

[reply]

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