The future popularity of languages

The popularity of a programming language matters. Popular languages are, well, popular -- they are used by a large number of people. That large user base implies a large set of available programmers who can be hired (important if you are running a project), a large set of supporting documents and web sites (important for managers and hobbyists), and significant sales for tools and training (important if you sell tools and training).

But there are two senses of popular. One sense is the "lots of people like it now" sense; the other is "lots of people will like it in the future" sense. This distinction was apparent at the beginning of my career, when PCs were new and the major programming languages of COBOL and FORTRAN were not the BASIC and Pascal and C of the PC revolution.

COBOL and FORTRAN were the heavyweights, the languages used by serious people in the business of serious programming. BASIC and Pascal and C (at least on PCs) were the languages of hobbyists and dreamers, "toy" languages on "toy" computers. Yet it was C that gave us C++ and eventually Java and C#, the heavyweight languages of today.

The measurements of language popularity blur these two groups of practitioners and dreamers. The practitioners use the tools for established systems and existing enterprises: in the 1970s and 1980s they used COBOL and today they use C++, C#, and Java. The dreamers of the 1970s used BASIC, C, Forth, and Pascal; today they use... well, what do they use?

The Programming Language Popularity web site contains a number of measures. I think that the most "dreamish" of these is the Github statistics. Github is the site for open source projects of all sizes, from enterprise level down to individual enthusiast. It seems a better measure than the "Craigslist" search (which would be weighted towards corporate projects) or the "Google" search (which would include tutorials and examples but perhaps little in the way of dreams).

The top languages in the "Github" list are:

• Objective C
• JavaScript
• Ruby
• Java
• Python
• PHP

A little later down the list (but still in the top twenty) are: Scala, Haskell, Clojure, Lua, and Erlang.

I think that the "Github" list is a good forward indicator for language popularity. I believe that some of these languages will be the future mainstream development languages.

Which ones exactly, I'm not sure.

Java is already a mainstream language; this index indicates a continued interest. I suspect JavaScript will have a bright future quite soon, with Microsoft supporting it for app development. Apple iOS uses Objective-C, so that one is also fairly obvious.

Languages rise and fall in popularity. Project managers would do well to track the up-and-coming languages. Software tends to live for a long time; if you want to stay with mainstream programming languages, you must move with the mainstream. Looking ahead may help with that effort.