I occasionally like to fool around with statistics gathered from the Internet. Sometimes, to produce something like langpop.com, which, even if it’s unscientific, I feel is useful, and more or less reflects my gut feeling about which way the wind is blowing. Other times, it’s fun just to grab some numbers, add them up, and not worry too much if they really have any validity or meaning. In this case, I suspect there’s something to them. What do you think?

The technique: take different job search sites, like monster.com, craigslist, and so on, search them for various languages (with Yahoo’s search API), count the hits, and then look at the ratios. For instance, Java jobs to Ruby jobs, with the idea that, painting with very broad brush strokes, the Java jobs are going to be more “enterprisy”, and the Ruby jobs hipper, cooler, and maybe gone six months from now as the economy tanks and funding dries up. Rough techniques notwithstanding, there do seem to be two distinct groups of sites, one with lower rations, the other with higher ratios (more Ruby jobs compared to Java jobs). For fun, I also included Python and Erlang, although there are very few Erlang jobs out there.

Of course, it’s also true that the bigger sites, like dice.com, had more jobs total. Indeed, dice.com has more hits for Erlang than CrunchBoard does for Java!