C# set to take Java's crown as Java drops 50 percent
Using book sales as surrogate tea leaves, Mike Hendrickson of the O'Reilly Radar finds life bleak for pretty much every major programming language except C#, Javascript, and Ruby. Java? It has plunged by 50 percent since 2003.
Sun Microsystems is hedging its bets on web scripting languages, recently adding Python experts to its fold. So perhaps Sun will weather the storm. Regardless, even despite its five-year slide, Java still holds the biggest share of the book-buying market, as this chart shows:
(Credit: O'Reilly Media)Are Java's days numbered? O'Reilly's data seems to suggest this:
Ruby was a small box last year and is now 8 largest language passing Perl and Python and is now knocking on the door for Visual Basic's spot. Ruby has the second largest unit growth after C# and went from 4% overall market share to 5% and is 4k units off of displacing VB for #7 overall. C# was equally impressive with a 36,811 unit growth or 18.85% growth and went from 11% market share in 2006 to 13% market share in 2007. At the rate it is going, it should surpass Java as the number one language this year as it is only (9,526) units short and is on a positive 18.85% growth rate while Java continues its slide at a (14.16%) clip.
What is the cause of Java's decline? I certainly see plenty of it within enterprises. Still, it's undeniable that the Web and its dynamic programming languages is upstaging Java. Arguably, too, Java has all the benefits and downsides to being a community product (though not enough of one for some people's tastes).
Is there a future for standalone Java applications? Of course. But is it a future that will drown in irrelevance in the wake of dynamic web languages?
What do you think?
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
No. It was almost certainly written in C++. In CODE. And considering that the majority of applications running the majority of corporations out there are written in Java now, you would do well to learn a little before you speak.
Just a thought...
But that's not what this study is about: it's about *books*. Newer, lesser known technologies on the upswing are what sells. Java sold tons of books while most developers were learning it. Nowadays, a lot of people are learning about Ruby (not using it, mind you; Ruby on Rails has far fewer actual users than most people think), so O'Reilly sells a lot of Ruby books.
Java developers, for the most part, don't read JAVA books anymore. They read Software Engineering books, Pattern books, Testing and Process books, etc... Most real, professional programmers out there use Java (look at the numbers of active projects as a real indicator of actual viability); so most of them are no longer interested in reading "Intro" books, which make up the vast majority of computer book sales.
On the other hand, the browser is also becoming the platform of choice for lightweight apps. In a fully connected world where we use a large number of small apps it doesn't make sense to have everything installed locally. In an age of fat network pipes it's more convenient to automatically download the latest version when you use it, then throw it away when you've finished. It's so easy that most web users don't even realize that's what they're doing.
This is not a new threat to MS. Netscape and Java first presented as a network platform in the mid 1990's. MS managed to kill that by spiking Java and cutting of Netscape's air supply. This time though, there is much wider and deeper market (read alternate vendors) understanding of the value of a neutral network platform. It's well understood that being at the mercy of MS is not a pleasant place to be. There's now huge pressure on MS to bring their network platform (IE and related technologies) into standards conformance.
I suspect Java has become heavyweight enough that it's no longer part of the lightweight app scenario. It's now firmly rooted in the enterprise space. Its place in the original network platform scenario has been taken by a well developed Javascript combined with any number of web frameworks like Ruby on Rails. It's instructive that the Python numbers (though not as strong as Ruby's) are also showing the same trend.
It will be interesting to see how this develops in the coming years. MS's ability to dominate the market has been eroded by anti-trust issues in the same way IBM was crippled. I can't help thinking MS has become the old IBM as Bill Gates so famously feared.
The same is true of Java. C# is newer and Microsoft has more marketing going on making people believe they just have to learn it or die. But Java has been around longer and more people use it but don't need the books most C# learners are trying to get.
From another site that monitors such things, C# is far, far behind Java in usage.
Technologies will come and go, but it seems strange to me that things like this are circulated as foregone conclusions of correlation.
I respect any developer that favorite is language of choice, but saying that a C# developer is playing with it for fun,
just because it's C#, it's an insult to the C# community, none the less, I found the argument baseless,
Java and C# are similar, at least in their concept, yeah java is older,
but it doesn't mean anything, so don't claim anything you sir don't know,
C# is powerful just like Java each with its own pros and cons.
C# is part of the .NET platform that evolves and raniking its way to the top of the software industry in every possible aspect, so don't underate it!
Bing! I don't think Java (or rather the JVM) has been Open Source long enough for that to have an impact but there is plenty of freely available material on the internet, even the mildy outdated but still relevant books available from http://mindview.net/ (the 4th edition of Thinking in Java is not free) have to be denting overall sales.
I don't imagine Version Control with Subversion is making any major sales, but then it is free to download under Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL) from http://svnbook.red-bean.com/ so the only reason to buy it is if, like me, you find it easier to get on with the printed page than the electronic document or you feel the authors deserve your hard-earned for a job well done.
How ironic that O'Reilly should publish CCAL works then use book sales as the basis or their opinion on the relative popularity of a language, after all, like attracts like and I doubt as many C# books are released for free as well as available in print.
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by ACLAC
May 9, 2009 6:41 AM PDT
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