The relative popularity of programming languages in 2014

I am mostly interested in the Dynamic and Open Source languages so there is no Java and C# and Objective-C in this comparison. There are two tools I've used. Google Trends and Alexa.

Last year I had a similar report.

Google Trends

Looking at the data during 2014 for the 5 major dynamic programming languages, this is what we get:

January 2014

                  %
PHP         95   36.5
Javascript  68   26.1
Python      47   18.0
Ruby        40   15.3
Perl        10    3.8
TOTAL:     260  

December 2014

                 %
PHP         89  35.1   
JavaScript  61  24.1
Python      48  18.9
Ruby        47  18.5
Perl         8   3.1
TOTAL:     253

The interesting part is the relative weight of these 5 languages among themselves. This is what we see in the second column. The percentage of searches for the specific terms out of all the searches for any of these 5 terms.

I was surprised to see Ruby growing and JavaScript shrinking in relative popularity.

The most popular web sites based on Alexa ranking

Are the Alexa ranking meaningful? See the correlation to what Google Analytics reports.

The most popular site in each of the above languages:

site	15 Jan 2013	1 Jan 2014	1 Jan 2015
php.net	310	238	438
jquery.com (JavaScript)	-	-	962
python.org	4,249	3,874	2,475
rubyonrails.org	11,646	11,117	6,494
cpan.org (Perl)	10,222	8,807	14,428
dartlang.org	-	38,338	57,787

Full list of the popularity indexes:

• PHP
• JavaScript
• Python
• Ruby
• Perl
• Dart

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