Is Ruby the next big thing?
Posted by admin | Filed under Web Dev
I’ll admit it, I thought the Ruby on Rails framework was going to be a fad that faded away within a year or two. However it’s still here, and while I’m not sure I’ve warmed up to Rails i’ve gotten a little more curious with it’s big brother Ruby. Now I have no hands on experience with Ruby it just seems as though its come up in conversation more recently that this time last year. My headhunter friend has frequently asked if I know any Ruby programmers.
Just for fun I played around with Google Trends this afternoon to see if in fact people are searching for Ruby any more now than they were a year ago. In an effort to ignore searches for “ruby” the gemstone versus Ruby the programming language I formatted searched for the phrase “ruby programming”. I don’t claim these results really show an accurate gauge of programming language popularity (check link for that) but it was a fun experiment. I threw in PHP and Python for a comparison but left out the big guns ie:Java, it just didn’t seem fair to compare Java to Ruby.
Search Trends in the United States
Search Trends in the United States in 2008
Search Trends Worldwide in 2008
I’d describe the graphs as “slow and steady”, while there didn’t seem to be any notable influx of changes I found it interesting how close Ruby and PHP results appeared in the United States. Event more surprising to me was that Python presented considerably higher search popularity than PHP in 2008. Maybe I should have titled the article “Is Python the Next Big Thing?”.
Tags: php, python, ruby, trends