From the “dynamic languages” files:
According to a new study from Evans Data, Ruby use is on the rise in North America. On a year-over-year basis, Ruby usage has increased by 40 percent so far in 2009.
But, even with the big increase, Ruby is still far from being pervasive. Evans’ study found that only 14 percent of developers in North America use Ruby some of the time. They are currently forecasting the number to rise to 20 percent for 2010.
The new results are from Evans Data’s latest North American Development Survey which received input from 400 developers.
The rise of Ruby, which is open source, is being complemented in a rise in Linux usage as a target platform for development. It’s not all positive for open source though. The Evans study also found that commercial SQL databases — by a wide margin (2.5x) — are more likely to be used than an open source SQL database for primary database operations.
“The increasing adoption of developers using scripting languages correlates with today’s overall emphasis on web centric applications which have to be highly malleable to rapidly changing market driven requirements,” John Andrews, president and CEO of Evans Data, said in a statement. “Interestingly, while we see Linux continue to increase as a target platform, this category of development reflects the greatest growth in targeting a non-Windows target platform.”
The increasing use of Ruby really shouldn’t be a surprise, in my opinion. After all, it’s the language that powers Twitter, as well as the Metasploit security framework.
Though Ruby (and Rails) use might be growing, it’s important to note that other open source dynamic languages are still doing well, too…
