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Irrelevant Programming Languages (Or, Lingo Not to Learn)

Mike Hendrickson has been analyzing some of Q1 2007 computer book sales data, where he's called out languages you'd be best served avoiding if you are young programmer...

"The following languages all sold between 1 and 99 units in Q1 '07. These are what I am considering the irrelevant programming languages."

*Irrelevant* U N I T S T I T L E S M A R K E T S H A R E
Language 2006
Units
2007
Units
2006
Titles
2007
Titles
06Mkt
Share
07Mkt
Share
alice 64 71 1 2 0.01% 0.02%
delphi 345 48 3 1 0.07% 0.01%
ocaml - 38 - 1 0.00% 0.01%
jcl 30 33 1 1 0.01% 0.01%
realbasic - 31 - 1 0.00% 0.01%
ada 26 11 2 1 0.01% 0.00%
labview 148 - 1 - 0.03% 0.00%
lingo 30 - 1 - 0.01% 0.00%
squeak 20 - 1 - 0.00% 0.00%
rexx 17 - 1 - 0.00% 0.00%
fortran 16 - 1 - 0.00% 0.00%

Via Chad's del.cio.us, via my network.

Update 5/20/07: Tom Morris cautions:

"...be careful about drawing any ‘I shouldn’t learn this’ type of analysis from this. Book purchases correlate with how hard the language is to learn and how fashionable it is and how bad the online or in-built documentation is. For instance, I have bought Eric van der Vlist’s book on XML Schema, but I don’t use XML Schema as much as RELAX NG. XSD is a pig of a schema language, while RNG is great."

Comments

TrackBack said:

# May 20, 2007 10:50 AM

BillyG said:

Just a heads up: you won't go far in the corporate mainframe batch world without JCL, but who's trying to get a seat in a 5x5 cell anymore

Of course, I loathed COBOL for its verbosity while in schoool, and still wound up taking the easy money route back in the 90's for 9 yrs.

Never say never...

# May 21, 2007 6:20 AM