Programming languages popularity

Trying to measure programming languages popularity is hard.
In an earlier post, I measured the number of the availability of jobs based on dice.com and similar places. Another interesting article is here. Both analysis supprt the view that C# and .NET jobs constitute the leading section of the job market, and more non-scientific research leads me to believe that .NET constitutes a majority of the NEW (as opposed to legacy, or code maintnance) programming jobs.

What do you think? I am looking for feedback, or your own experience.

telnet rules

A fact often missed by people too-used to web sites is that most services on the internet have underlying protocols. For example, if I want to do internic search on a domain name, I could google for a service that does just that; but I can just as easily get the information myself from port 43 of internic.net

Instructions:
telnet internic.net 43
type: =blogger.com
and you get (truncated):
Domain Name: BLOGGER.COM
Registrar: EMARKMONITOR IC. DBA MARKMONITOR
Whois Server: whois.markmonitor.com
Referral URL: http://www.markmonitor.com
Name Server: NS2.GOOGLE.COM
Name Server: NS1.GOOGLE.COM
Name Server: NS3.GOOGLE.COM
Name Server: NS4.GOOGLE.COM
Status: REGISTRAR LOCK
Updated Date: 22-jul-2005
Creation Date: 22-jun-1999
Expiration Date: 22-jun-2011

now, wasn't this easy?

.NET jobs exceed Java jobs

With the release of Visual Studio 2005 and the growing popularity and maturity of .NET, it seems more and more businesses are looking for .NET developers, as opposed to Java developers. Java popularity also suffers from competition from other Open Source languages and platforms such as Perl and Ruby (on rails).

For example, a quick search [Jan/2/06] on dice.com for .NET for '.NET' finds 9444 positions; 'Java' returns 2635.
Note that a search for 'C#' only returns 797 positions; .NET is by far a stronger brand name than C#, and the '#' sign wreaks havoc with multiple search engines.



Similar nationwide searches in hotjobs.yahoo.com read
Java : 6126
.Net : 10871
C# : # not supported in yahoo search

XML is also becoming a strong requirement:
XML (hotjobs.yahoo): 3396
XML (Dice): 6949



Tags: jobs .net java software market