Programming language adoption rates are tough to determine, but always of interest. We’ve looked at a couple attempts to measure it before: a Github language survey and the TIOBE Index. Now RedMonk has published some data from code management vendor Black Duck.
Black Duck has a knowledge base containing a huge amount of open source code. It gave RedMonk data regarding how many lines of each programming language can be found in its knowledge base. It’s not a perfect representation of language usage, but it provides some insight into what open source developers are doing.
JavaScript saw big growth in 2010, unsurprisingly. In fact, it surpassed Java, which dropped off. C is still the most popular, and actually had a small bump between 2009 and 2010.
RedMonk’s Stephen O’Grady concludes:
With the caveat, then, that the above data is simply what’s measurable by Black Duck and cannot therefore be considered representative in a strict statistical sense of developers worldwide, it may be time for you to look at JavaScript. And maybe node.js, while you’re at it.
You can find our collection of resources for learning JavaScript here and for learning Node.js here.
