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  4. JVM (and Ruby) Language Popularity - Google, Tiobe, SO, GitHub

JVM (and Ruby) Language Popularity - Google, Tiobe, SO, GitHub

Felix Dahlke user avatar by
Felix Dahlke
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Mar. 13, 12 · Interview
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Curator's Note:  For even more data on this JVM race, you can see the poll that was conducted in the Javalobby community, and the coder general blog, which had a lot of participation from the HN crowd. 

I was lately interested in how popular the major JVM languages are in comparison, so I did some quick tests.

I compared Java, Scala, Groovy, Clojure and JRuby. I included both JRuby and Ruby in my queries, because JRuby isn’t really a distinct language.

The Tests

Google

Quite obvious, eh? I searched for “x language” where x is one of the languages and wrote down the number of results. I’m fully aware that this isn’t a very good test.

Ruby97,400,000
Java46,200,000
Scala29,200,000
Groovy17,700,000
Clojure3,460,000
JRuby1,770,000
                

I thought Java would come out on top, surprised me.

Tiobe

The good old programming language popularity index.

Java#1
Ruby#13
Groovy#31
Clojure>#50
Scala>#50
JRubyNot listed
                

I thought Scala would do way better than Groovy.

GitHub

The most popular project hosting service.

Ruby#2
Java#5
Scala#18
Clojure#21
Groovy#22
JRubyNot listed
                

Scala, Clojure and Groovy are pretty close here.

StackOverflow

Probably the most important Q/A site for programmers.

Java218,432
Ruby41,435
Scala8,104
Groovy3,772
Clojure2,762
JRuby1,051
                

Java and Ruby are quite popular, the others less so.

Conclusion

Unsurprisingly, Java is by far the most popular language. So if alternative JVM languages are the future, the future doesn’t seem to be quite here yet.

The second place goes to Ruby. Ruby, not JRuby – it’s hard to figure out what percentage of the Ruby community is using JRuby.

Scala, Groovy and Clojure are similar in popularity. Sometimes Scala is on top, sometimes Groovy. Nonetheless, I’m actually most impressed by Clojure. It did pretty well, considering that it’s radically different to Java/Groovy/Scala and only 5 years old. (Groovy and Scala are both 9 years old, Java and Ruby both 18.)

Bottom line: When considering which JVM language (other than Java) to use, popularity can’t really be a factor. That’s good.

Java (programming language) Java virtual machine GitHub Google (verb)

Published at DZone with permission of Felix Dahlke, DZone MVB. See the original article here.

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