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Language job trends

24 Feb 2010

Based on someone else’s tweet I spent a few minutes diddling with the Indeed job graph widget and thought this was actually a pretty interesting graph of a bunch of functional languages that are hot and in relatively the same scale job-wise:


scala, clojure, erlang, F#, Haskell, Lisp Job Trends graph
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scala, clojure, erlang, F#, Haskell, Lisp Job Trends scala jobsclojure jobserlang jobsF# jobsHaskell jobsLisp jobs

In particular, you can see in this data:

  1. Lisp is strongest going back a few years but is relatively flat.
  2. Haskell is next strongest and has been enjoying slow growth.
  3. Erlang took off at the beginning of 2008 and continues with solid growth, no doubt from the importance of messaging and NoSQL factors.
  4. Scala had a minor wave along with Erlang in 2008 and then shot out of the cannon in 2009.
  5. F# also started to hit the awareness in 2009 and I suspect it’s primed for strong further growth in the next couple years.
  6. Clojure is the latest entrant with things just kicking off last summer.

If you switch to relative graph mode, you can get a better feel for these growth inflection points:


scala, clojure, erlang, F#, Haskell, Lisp Job Trends graph
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scala, clojure, erlang, F#, Haskell, Lisp Job Trends scala jobsclojure jobserlang jobsF# jobsHaskell jobsLisp jobs

And at the suggestion of someone on Twitter, if we add Groovy to the mix you can see the obvious strong interest in alternatives closer to Java:


scala, clojure, erlang, F#, Haskell, Lisp, Groovy Job Trends graph
</p>
scala, clojure, erlang, F#, Haskell, Lisp, Groovy Job Trends scala jobsclojure jobserlang jobsF# jobsHaskell jobsLisp jobsGroovy jobs

But then of course comparing to Java as a whole you start to understand the bigger forces at work:


scala, clojure, erlang, F#, Haskell, Lisp, Groovy, Java Job Trends graph
</p>
scala, clojure, erlang, F#, Haskell, Lisp, Groovy, Java Job Trends scala jobsclojure jobserlang jobsF# jobsHaskell jobsLisp jobsGroovy jobsJava jobs

UPDATE: By popular request, here’s a graph with Java, C#, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Groovy.


Java, C#, Perl, Python, Ruby, Groovy Job Trends graph
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Java, C#, Perl, Python, Ruby, Groovy Job Trends Java jobsC# jobsPerl jobsPython jobsRuby jobsGroovy jobs