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:
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| scala, clojure, erlang, F#, Haskell, Lisp Job Trends | scala jobs – clojure jobs – erlang jobs – F# jobs – Haskell jobs – Lisp jobs |
In particular, you can see in this data:
- Lisp is strongest going back a few years but is relatively flat.
- Haskell is next strongest and has been enjoying slow growth.
- Erlang took off at the beginning of 2008 and continues with solid growth, no doubt from the importance of messaging and NoSQL factors.
- Scala had a minor wave along with Erlang in 2008 and then shot out of the cannon in 2009.
- F# also started to hit the awareness in 2009 and I suspect it’s primed for strong further growth in the next couple years.
- 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:
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| scala, clojure, erlang, F#, Haskell, Lisp Job Trends | scala jobs – clojure jobs – erlang jobs – F# jobs – Haskell jobs – Lisp 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:
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| scala, clojure, erlang, F#, Haskell, Lisp, Groovy Job Trends | scala jobs – clojure jobs – erlang jobs – F# jobs – Haskell jobs – Lisp jobs – Groovy jobs |
But then of course comparing to Java as a whole you start to understand the bigger forces at work:
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| scala, clojure, erlang, F#, Haskell, Lisp, Groovy, Java Job Trends | scala jobs – clojure jobs – erlang jobs – F# jobs – Haskell jobs – Lisp jobs – Groovy jobs – Java jobs |
UPDATE: By popular request, here’s a graph with Java, C#, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Groovy.
