rails symphonies

After being announced the Programming Language of 2006 By the TIOBE Programming Community Index, it seems that Ruby might have met its match. Eventhough Ruby book sales seem to be growing at an alarming rate.

Although, Ruby is the rising star if you look back 1 year, it is not growing anymore the last couple of months. Even worse, since April it is slightly declining. If this appears to be the new trend, then also Ruby does not become the “next big programming language”.

Java, C and C++ have been dominating the TIOBE index from the start and it seems as if they will keep this status for a long while. Possible new candidates are Lua (from 55 to 23 in 1 years time) and Groovy (from 103 to 52). These are, just like Ruby, lightweight scripting languages. I have the impression there is a maximum to such dynamically interpreted languages. Although very popular for web-based programming, statically compiled languages remain the core of all enterprise software systems. Based on this, I predict that the only candidate to change the top 3 is C#. This will not be achieved via hypes and vast jumps in the index but very gradually.

Note: Emphasis added by me

It’s still a bit premature Ruby, just hold on, we’ll still have another 6 months to go.

Don’t worry Ruby, I still love you for the school girl you are. Maybe you just need some time to grow up.

Worse comes to worse, the Malaysia Ruby Brigade will protect you, right guys?