I was poking around the Internet the other day and fell upon Google Trends, a tool which, from what I can gather tracks the growth and decay of popular keywords. While this is by no means a definitive look into the market of C#, Ruby and PHP, I thought it would be interesting to see how popular these languages are, being web-development languages.
What I find particularly interesting with this graph is convergence. PHP is losing its footing as the top dog as the one and only web development language. This preliminary glance into technology popularity doesn't factor "Zend", "Ruby on Rails" and "ASP.NET", which are the framework counterparts that make "PHP", "Ruby" and "C#" suited for enterprise web development.
The state-by-state breakdown is even more peculiar. In every US state except for Washington, PHP is the dominant search keyword. In Washington, it's C#:
If I was an ASP.NET developer, or someone trying to market ASP.NET products, I know I'd start in Washington. Take a look at the full data at Google Trends.
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Looking specifically at the USA, why do you think this trend towards utilizing PHP has not been been moving that way for Washington?
And with this process of convergence, what sort of speculations can we make concerning the future market of web development language as a whole?
I think that the emphasis in Washington might hint at the kind of foothold that Microsoft has on Government, and how Washington is of course the home of Redmond which is Microsoft HQ…
I think that the future is very much in the hands of the framework developers. Microsoft is pushing the new MVC framework, Zend and Cake in the PHP world and Ruby on Rails for Ruby and the Java camp.
With Sun and IBM backing PHP and Microsoft supporting PHP on their new version of IIS and the Visual Studio IDE, I’m betting that PHP will be here for a long time.
C# I feel will still dominate corporate intranets due to the rich libraries that tie it to the Microsoft Office suite.
Ruby’s maturing and I’m sure that it will grow both in intranets and on the web. The language is beautiful, the culture is fun and the patterns make development a joy, however I have reservations about the MVC pattern and Rails tends to force this pattern, whereas Zend and ASP.NET have looser architectural conventions. In short, I’m not which way is better, but I think they all have bright futures.
Interesting observation.
Microsoft is pushing hard to gain a strong foothold in the web programming sphere and to certain extent they are succeeding. Especially in India I was surprised to see the dominance of .NET platform for both intranet and internet development.
http://trends.google.com/trends?q=php%2Cruby%2Cc%23&ctab=0&geo=IN&geor=all&date=all&sort=0