The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 2014

As long as we have been doing our programming language rankings here at RedMonk, dating back to the original publication by Drew Conway and John Myles White, we have been trying to find the correct timing. Should it be monthly? Quarterly? Annually? While the appetite for up to date numbers is strong, the truth is that historically changes from snapshot to snapshot have been minimal. This is in part the justification for the shift from quarterly to bi-annual rankings. Although we snapshot the data approximately monthly, there is little perceived benefit to cranking out essentially the same numbers month after month. There are more volatile ranking systems that reflect more ephemeral, day-to-day metrics, but how much more or less popular can a programming language realistically become in a month, or even two? The aspect of these rankings that most interests us is the trajectories they may record: which languages are trending up? Which are in decline? Given that and the adoption curve for languages in general, the most reliable approach would seem to be one that measures performance over multi-month periods at a minimum.

via The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 2014 – tecosystems.