UPDATE: Please see a more current version of web and scripting languages for August 2010.

At the beginning of this month, I compared the job trends for traditional programming languages like C++, Java and others. That was initially done because of TIOBE releasing their yearly language rankings. I also noticed that is was approximately 6 months from my last job trends posts. At that time, I wrote a second post regarding Web 2.0 programming language job trends. In this post, I have changed the list of languages a bit. First, Objective C is now in the traditional programming list so it is not included here. In order to make the list a little larger I have added Flex and Groovy to the list.

So, what do the trends from Indeed.com look like?

Obviously, JavaScript demand continues to rise, growing by 100% over the last 5 years. Flex has mostly flat demand though it looks like there is some growth in the past six months. PHP is also growing rapidly, probably because it is simple to learn and you can get a decent application running fairly quickly. Python, Ruby and Rails are all showing solid growth as well, with Python being the leader. Groovy is showing a nice growth trend so far, but its demand is significantly less than the others.

Now, to compare the trends against another site, we look at the trends from SimplyHired.com.

Because the trend data is limited to 2 years, we really see the short term bumps. Interestingly, SimplyHired does not show JavaScript to have a dominant position over the other languages, though it does still lead significantly. Both Flex and Python have shown very nice growth over the past 6 months. In all of the languages, there is a growth surge in July or August of 2009, though some of the surges were smaller than others. SimplyHired does not show the same volume for PHP when compared to Flex as the Indeed trends do. Otherwise, the trends from both sites are fairly similar.

Lastly, lets look at the relative trends for job growth from Indeed.com. This is something that I missed in the last post and it shows an interesting perspective of the job trends.

What is obvious from this chart is that Groovy demand has skyrocketed over the past year. However, showing 2000% growth over a small number of jobs still means there could be a small number of jobs when compared to the other languages. Ruby and Rails have also shown an increasing growth trend that is much higher than the others. While most of the other jobs are increasing their growth, Python seems to be leading the way and could be poised for a hockey-stick growth period. Honestly, I am surprised at the rapid growth trends of Ruby and Rails, as I figured they had somewhat fallen out of favor. I also expected Python to be growing much faster, but all of this could be due to the people I listen to and blogs that I read.

Based on all of this, I can easily state that JavaScript is still something all web developers should know. This includes those mostly server-side programmers that want to build a web application. Otherwise, it looks like PHP, Ruby, Rails and Python would be solid language choices if you were looking to learn something new. Groovy looks like it is still at the point where you should learn it if your current environment uses it, but it may not be that useful it getting you your next job. Now, where did I put that Python book?

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