Programming languages

pooyad — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:29:00 GMT

I always get asked by our customers about market share of the major programming languages and what percentage of people are programming in .NET vs. Java or PHP or ... . Technically .NET should be broken into the specific language as the .NET framework supports multiple languages. There is no perfect way to come up with these numbers, you can do surveys but the pool you choose tends to be biased, you can check the languages used on websites but that only covers one aspect of applications. One of the ways that is pretty good at estimating (not necessarily market share but trends) is to use books written on each language (and how many copies are sold).

Oreilly recently published the state of the computer book market, check out the results for yourself. It's good to see so much interest in Python (and powershell) recently and also interesting to see the trends of Java, .NET languages and C# in particular.

I'm a big believer in learning more than 1 language and feel that a programmer can pick up a new language pretty quickly (the basics, libraries and the rest will come in time). It's actually very useful to know multiple languages so that you can choose the right one for each project rather than going with the one you're comfortable with that can be bent to solve the problem.

Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) - great news for .NET development

pooyad — Wed, 02 May 2007 16:17:00 GMT

Check out Jim Hugunin's blog post about the new Dynamic Language Runtime, better support for dynamic languages (Python, Ruby, ...) on .NET. This is huge for me, .NET already had support for dynamic languages but this takes it to a new level with a better security model and more real integration with the full .NET platform. I've always been a big fan of dynamic languages and think they're incredibly productive when used the proper way and for the appropriate development. I've been following Jim's work since his days before Microsoft on IronPython.

Read his post for more details and keep an eye on his blog in the next few weeks as more details of the DLR will be discussed.

Pooya's place (in the Gulf) : python

Programming languages

Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) - great news for .NET development