Now that enterprises have chosen stable platforms (JVM and .Net), on top of which we can choose a syntax out of many available, which language will you pick up as your next favourite?

New languages to have a look at (my own selection)

Based on what I read everyday in various blogs, I arbitrarily reduced the list of candidates to just a few language that I believe are rising and promising:

• Scala
• F#
• Clojure
• Ruby
• Groovy

Of course each language has its own advantages, and we should definitely take a look at several of them, not just one. But the popularity of the languages is also important to have a chance of using them in your day work.

Growth rates stats

In order to get some facts about the trends of these new programming languages in the real world, Google trends is your friend. Here is the graph of rate of growth (NOT absolute numbers), worldwide:

I’m impressed at how Clojure is taking off so brutally… In absolute terms, Ruby comes first, Groovy second.

So that was for the search queries on Google. What about the job posts? Again these are growth rates, not absolute numbers, and with a focus on the US.

Scala, F#, clojure, Ruby, Groovy Job Trends

Scala jobs – F# jobs – Clojure jobs – Ruby jobs – Groovy jobs

Again, the growth of Clojure is impressive, even though it remains very small in absolute terms, where Ruby comes first, followed by Groovy.

Popularity index

So far the charts only showed how new languages are progressing compared to each other.

To get an indication of the actual present popularity of each language, the usual place to go is at the TIOBE indices (last published June 2010):

The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, Yahoo!, Wikipedia and YouTube are used to calculate the ratings.

In short:

• Ruby is ranked 12th; Ruby is kinda mainstream already
• LISP/Scheme/Clojure are ranked together 16th, almost the same rank than in 2005 when Clojure did not exist yet.
• Scala, Groovy, F#/Caml are ranked 43, 44 and 45th respectively

Conclusion

Except Ruby, the new languages Scala, Groovy, F# and Clojure are not yet well established, but they do progress quickly, especially Clojure then Scala.

In absolute terms, and within my selection of languages, Groovy is the more popular after Ruby, followed by Scala. Clojure and F# are still far behind.

I have a strong feeling that the time has come for developers to mix alternate syntax in addition to their legacy language (Java or C#), still on top of the same platform, something also called polyglot programming. It’s also time for the ideas of functional programming to become more popular.

In practice, these new languages are more likely to be introduced initially for automated testing and build systems, before being used for production code, especially with high productivity web frameworks that leverage their distinct strengths.

So which one to choose? If you’re already on the JVM, why not choose Groovy or Scala first, then Clojure to get a grasp on something different. If you’re on .Net, why not choose Scala and then F#. Ad if you were to choose Ruby, I guess you would have done it already.