It is August, so that means it is time to review the job trends. First we look at the traditional programming languages, which includes Java, C++, C#, Objective C, Perl and Visual Basic. I have not decided how to change this yet, but hopefully soon I will get the change to mix things up a bit. As always, please review some of the other job trends posts to see if your favorite language is already in one of these posts.

First, we look at the job trends from Indeed.com:

Over the past few years, the trends are fairly flat if not slightly declining. Some of this could be related to industry using more languages outside of this traditional core. More overall language analysis would definitely give us more information on that. As you can see, Java has showed some gains in 2013 after a drop in 2012. C++ and C# have really started to follow the same trends over the past 18 months, which is flat for 2013. Perl has been in slight decline for a few years, but has maintained demand in 2013. Visual Basic continues to stick around, but doesn’t show any real growth.

Now, let’s look at SimplyHired’s short term trends:

SimplyHired’s trends continue to be fairly flat, with a slight decline towards the end of last year. SimplyHired’s data is now over 6 months old, so it is difficult to a good idea of current trends. One odd trend is the jump for Visual Basic at the end of 2012. Otherwise, most of the trends are very similar.

Finally, here is a review of the relative scaling from Indeed, which provides an interesting perspective on relative job growth:

Objective-C growth jumped again after a drop at the beginning of this year. C# growth is definitely in decline over the past two years. Most of the languages seem to flatten during 2013, which is similar to the overall demand trends as well. C++ looks to be in true decline as the growth trend is now below zero. Perl, Visual Basic and Java are all hovering at 0% growth.

So, most traditional languages have flat-lined during 2013. This basically means that the typical enterprise development is not growing but it is a stable mature market. Obviously, mobile development is continuing to grow with the Objective-C trends, but that mobile growth is not really reflected in the Java trends. What do we do now? First, we keep an eye on these trends and we start comparing these with the trends for languages like JavaScript, Python and Ruby. In addition, we have to track the mobile trends to see how they are affecting language growth as well.