OT: Comparison of Java, Perl, PHP, C++, C#, VB in PECI survey

[asj]

A new informal survey shows that Java supports a much larger and
faster growing book publishing ecosystem than other languages,
including PHP, Perl, C++, C#, and VB. The survey (which I'll christen
the Publishing Ecosystem Capacity Indicator - or PECI for short)
looked at the number of books published in amazon.com for each year
since 1995.

http://www.jroller.com/page/kalimantan/20040507#peci_java_rising_above_perl

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excerpt:

image:
http://www.blueboard.com/phone/publishing_capacity.gif

Several things can be gleaned from this informal survey.

*Java has generated more books per year than any other of the surveyed
languages since 2000.

* The languages can be grouped into several subcategories:
(1) Fast-growing - languages that show an overall and rapid increase
in number of books published/year. This includes Java, PHP and C#.
(2) Mature - characterized by stable number of books published per
year. This includes C++, and Perl.
(3) Declining - characterized by an overall decline in books
published. This includes Visual Basic/VB.NET


* Among the fast-growing category, Java is the only one among the 3
that is not a very new entry. Both PHP and C# are relatively new
entries. However, Java has risen the fastest among the 3, and much
more significantly, the projected number of Java books in 2004 shows a
larger percentage and absolute increase than both PHP and C#.

* The number of books published showed a significant decline for all
languages from 2002 to 2003, then showed a significant increase for
all languages (except for VB) from 2003 to 2004 (projected).

The results are interesting to say the least. For me at least, the
most interesting result is how Java still shows all the
characteristics of a rapidly growing language, even though it's been
almost 9 years since it was first announced to the world in 1995. It's
even more telling that in the rebound of books published from
2003-2004, Java shows the LARGEST INCREASE in both percentage and
absolute numbers. This again shows that Java is rapidly expanding into
new arenas (telephony, smart cards, mobiles, etc) at an almost
unbelievable rate.

 

[Herfried K. Wagner [MVP]]

* (e-mail address removed) (asj) scripsit:
[...]

VB programmers don't need books to write code, Java programmers do.

 

[Tom Shelton]

A new informal survey shows that Java supports a much larger and
faster growing book publishing ecosystem than other languages,
including PHP, Perl, C++, C#, and VB. The survey (which I'll christen
the Publishing Ecosystem Capacity Indicator - or PECI for short)
looked at the number of books published in amazon.com for each year
since 1995.

http://www.jroller.com/page/kalimantan/20040507#peci_java_rising_above_perl

--------------------------------------------------------------------

excerpt:

image:
http://www.blueboard.com/phone/publishing_capacity.gif

Several things can be gleaned from this informal survey.

*Java has generated more books per year than any other of the surveyed
languages since 2000.

* The languages can be grouped into several subcategories:
(1) Fast-growing - languages that show an overall and rapid increase
in number of books published/year. This includes Java, PHP and C#.
(2) Mature - characterized by stable number of books published per
year. This includes C++, and Perl.
(3) Declining - characterized by an overall decline in books
published. This includes Visual Basic/VB.NET


* Among the fast-growing category, Java is the only one among the 3
that is not a very new entry. Both PHP and C# are relatively new
entries. However, Java has risen the fastest among the 3, and much
more significantly, the projected number of Java books in 2004 shows a
larger percentage and absolute increase than both PHP and C#.

* The number of books published showed a significant decline for all
languages from 2002 to 2003, then showed a significant increase for
all languages (except for VB) from 2003 to 2004 (projected).

The results are interesting to say the least. For me at least, the
most interesting result is how Java still shows all the
characteristics of a rapidly growing language, even though it's been
almost 9 years since it was first announced to the world in 1995. It's
even more telling that in the rebound of books published from
2003-2004, Java shows the LARGEST INCREASE in both percentage and
absolute numbers. This again shows that Java is rapidly expanding into
new arenas (telephony, smart cards, mobiles, etc) at an almost
unbelievable rate.

Posting your Java advocacy stuff to the ms .net groups again, hey asj... I
thought you said you had stopped doing that in another conversation we
had...

 

[The Ruling Class]

I agree.

Posting your Java advocacy stuff to the ms .net groups again, hey asj...
I thought you said you had stopped doing that in another conversation we
had...

It's worthwhile to programmers who want to make sure their investing their
time in the right languages.


__
W '04 <:> Open

 

[Roedy Green]

The results are interesting to say the least. For me at least, the
most interesting result is how Java still shows all the
characteristics of a rapidly growing language, even though it's been
almost 9 years since it was first announced to the world in 1995.

Part of the reason for this is Java has gone through some major
upgrades, each requiring a new set of textbooks.

I refer to 1.0 -> 1.1 event handling

invention of Collections

AWT -> Swing

1.5 generics and enums.

There are also things like JESS that are written in Java, but are not
really about Java. They may be filed with the Java books.

The language itself could be covered by something the size of
Kernighan's white C book, The C Programming Language. What all the
Java books are really about is the class libraries.

 

[JGH]

Who learns a programming language via books these days? Everything you need
to know is on-line.

 

[The Ruling Class]

krf wrote:

MY informal survey shows that computer books follow the standard rules of
fads. Dot.net is announced - the bookshelves are covered with stacks of
hurry up dot.net books. C# sharp hits the news, shelves are emptied with
the old books being placed on the discount table, and nothing but C# books
in sight. Change the language to anything you like - the formula is the
same. I have learned to wait for the change in cycles to get three times
the number of books for the original retail price.

I agree. I bought all my c# books used at Amazon. 2002 seemed to be the
*boom* -- so the price of the "c# class design handbook" from wrox ( a
really good book, actually ) which is sitting on my picnic table: list:
$40. Purchase used at amazon: $12

 

[Nikolai Chuvakhin]

(e-mail address removed) (asj) wrote in message

A new informal survey shows that Java supports a much larger and
faster growing book publishing ecosystem than other languages,
including PHP, Perl, C++, C#, and VB.

OK, but what does it mean or prove? If a certain programming
language yields more book publishing than others, it may mean
any of the following:

1. It is a superior programming language with a lot of
potential, so lots of people want to learn it.
2. It is most often taught in computer science programs,
so students are required to buy books on it.
3. It is unduly complicated, so people can't learn it
without reading several books.
4. It is pooorly documented, so people have to learn
things out of third-party books as opposed to online
help and language documentation.
5. The books describing it, on average, lack breadth
and/or depth of coverage, so people end up buying
several titles while in case of other languages one
typically does the job.
6. It is fragmented, that is, has many "dialects", so
people have to learn each of them separetely.

Cheers,
NC

 

[AlexS]

one more point:

- commercial hype makes you believe it is language of future big earnings,
So more books are published because none can prove the statement.

Generally, I think that to try to find out what is best 3G language is like
chess play - lots of fun (intellectual) and no sensible result.
Btw, you can substitute hockey or car racing for chess - please change
intellectual to instinctive then.

 

[asj]

(e-mail address removed) (asj) wrote in message


OK, but what does it mean or prove?

One survey does not "prove" anything, nor was the thing meant to prove
anything. However, it is interesting because the results seem to
correlate with other studies on language usage today (e.g. the decline
of VB, so this is not simply a result that applies to book
publishing). I was also surprised by the general dip in 2003 after a
strong 2002, and the consistent rebound for all languages (except VB)
in 2004 (assuming the straighline projection for this year is valid).

Simply put, I was intrigued by the possibility that this method
(measuring the "carrying capacity" or ability of a particular language
"ecosystem" to absorb new published books per year) might be a way to
gauge the level and direction of usage for various technologies. Some
of the factors affecting this are total number of practitioners in the
language, whether or not the language is used heavily in academia,
whether or not the language is heavily "hyped", whether or not the
language has been giving rise to new features at such a rapid pace
that new books are needed to supply the new demand, etc.

Your question about whether or not poor documentation is a cause may
have some merits, but i doubt it. For example, Java is extremely
heavily documented online, whereas PHP and Perl, being open source, is
probably a big mess (I use open source servers and tools and many are
in dire need of a few good editors and writers), and yet the stats do
not correlate with your suggestion.

More likely, it is that PHP and Perl (and C#, to be honest about it)
are limited in their applicability and use today (VB is not, but
people seem to be defecting en masse from that language to Java and
C#, which might explain the decline). For example, PHP, although it is
probably the most heavily used scripting language on the web, is used
mainly for web pages, and there are only so many ways you can make a
new book on the same topic. ie., you run out of things to say.

just my 2 centavos.

 

[Tim Smith]

A new informal survey shows that Java supports a much larger and faster
growing book publishing ecosystem than other languages, including PHP,
Perl, C++, C#, and VB. The survey (which I'll christen the Publishing
Ecosystem Capacity Indicator - or PECI for short) looked at the number of
books published in amazon.com for each year since 1995.

But is this a good thing? A large number of books on a given subject often
means one or both of:

1. It's the flavor of the month with the PHBs, and so every publisher rushes
out a ton of crappy books.

2. The thing itself has a lot of crappy aspects, leading to a need for a lot
of books.

There are many Java libraries and technologies that are very awkward to use,
and bloated in their interfaces. Things that are easy to figure out in,
say, Perl, just from the perldoc documentation, often send me to the
bookstore in Java.

 

[The Ruling Class]

But is this a good thing? A large number of books on a given subject
often means one or both of:

1. It's the flavor of the month with the PHBs, and so every publisher
rushes out a ton of crappy books.

2. The thing itself has a lot of crappy aspects, leading to a need for a
lot of books.

There are many Java libraries and technologies that are very awkward to
use,
and bloated in their interfaces. Things that are easy to figure out in,
say, Perl, just from the perldoc documentation, often send me to the
bookstore in Java.

I'm still trying to figure out what JINI is.

 

[R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah]

(e-mail address removed) (asj) wrote in message


OK, but what does it mean or prove? If a certain programming
language yields more book publishing than others, it may mean
any of the following:

1. It is a superior programming language with a lot of
potential, so lots of people want to learn it.
2. It is most often taught in computer science programs,
so students are required to buy books on it.
3. It is unduly complicated, so people can't learn it
without reading several books.
4. It is pooorly documented, so people have to learn
things out of third-party books as opposed to online
help and language documentation.
5. The books describing it, on average, lack breadth
and/or depth of coverage, so people end up buying
several titles while in case of other languages one
typically does the job.
6. It is fragmented, that is, has many "dialects", so
people have to learn each of them separetely.

Wow! This time phpSt.Nikolai Chuvakhin rocks!

 

[asj]

one more point:

- commercial hype makes you believe it is language of future big earnings,
So more books are published because none can prove the statement.

that may be true to a point, and especially for languages that are
relatively new, but the system would rapidly balance itself out as
publishers note that books they are publishing are not selling as fast
as they are being produced.

i think the point is that the larger the target audience and the
larger the scope of the class libraries of the language, the more
likely that language ecosystem will be able to carry very large
numbers of new published books per year. in the case of java, you not
only have a language with one of the largest populations of
developers, but also an entire language api library and platform that
embraces such disparate areas as embedded programming, smartcards,
mobiles, servers, desktops, web, home programming, digital and audio
and 2d/3d programming, etc. plus, i noticed the large numbers of books
dedicated to open source java implementations such as mvc frameworks
like struts, servlet containers like tomcat, the j2ee app server JBOSS
(and in future the J2EE Apache app server geronimo), lucene search
engines, etc etc etc.

 

[krf]

A new informal survey shows that Java supports a much larger and faster
growing book publishing ecosystem than other languages, including PHP,
Perl, C++, C#, and VB. The survey (which I'll christen the Publishing
Ecosystem Capacity Indicator - or PECI for short) looked at the number
of books published in amazon.com for each year since 1995.

MY informal survey shows that computer books follow the standard rules of
fads. Dot.net is announced - the bookshelves are covered with stacks of
hurry up dot.net books. C# sharp hits the news, shelves are emptied with
the old books being placed on the discount table, and nothing but C# books
in sight. Change the language to anything you like - the formula is the
same. I have learned to wait for the change in cycles to get three times
the number of books for the original retail price.

Right now Booksamillion looks like a PHP store with acres of them and you
can haul half and third price Java books out by the carload.

Besides, if you have bought many computer books, you will well know that
90 percent of them are to sell, not to learn anything from.

krf

 

[Chung Leong]

(e-mail address removed) (asj) wrote in message


OK, but what does it mean or prove? If a certain programming
language yields more book publishing than others, it may mean
any of the following:

I think what it show is that Java is mentioned more often in job ads. It's
no secret in the PHP community that there's lesser demand for our service
and our earning power is weaker.

 

[asj]

But is this a good thing? A large number of books on a given subject often
means one or both of:

1. It's the flavor of the month with the PHBs, and so every publisher rushes
out a ton of crappy books.

uh...java has been with us for 9 years...this might be true for C#
though. notice that this survey correlates well with other surveys of
language usage. for example, java is extremely well represented in any
survey of the job data banks, and surveys of language popularity using
internet searches also show java as the #1 language in use. thus, it
makes sense that java is capable of supprting the greatest number of
books published per year.

There are many Java libraries and technologies that are very awkward to use,
and bloated in their interfaces. Things that are easy to figure out in,
say, Perl, just from the perldoc documentation, often send me to the
bookstore in Java.

you're kidding right? i've been using perl for about 1.5-2 years now
(as a hobby true, but...), and the docs for perl do not compare at all
to the online docs for Java from sun, IBM, and many open source
organizations like apache and jboss, and which even include the source
for all the core classes. there are even several books online as PDFs.
on the whole, open source docs do not compare well...i use a lot of
open source tools at work and trying to find an answer using google is
awkward to say the least.

the perl syntax itself is confusing and prone to being abused by a
developer such that large projects become almost illegible to another
developer taking over. just compare a perl script to a java one - java
is overlong and stricter compared to perl, but that helps with
maintainability for very large projects.

 

[Tim Smith]

uh...java has been with us for 9 years...this might be true for C# though.
notice that this survey correlates well with other surveys of language
usage. for example, java is extremely well represented in any

C was around for many years, with only a handful of books, and then exploded
in the bookstores.

....

you're kidding right?

No. Java libraries often provide very complex interfaces to simple tasks,
whereas Perl modules tend to provide simple interfaces to simple tasks.
Compare the two in, say, database access, cryptography, and XML parsing, if
you want some examples.

There is nothing inherent in Java that forces it to be this way (heck, I
have my own Java crypto library at work that provides a simple, functional,
interface, that can be documented clearly and completely in one page).

 

[asj]

C was around for many years, with only a handful of books, and then exploded
in the bookstores.

please, some documentation of this (not that it actually relates to
anything here). also, java exploded in the bookstores from the very
first, and it still is.

you don't seem to get the first thing about business...publishers will
NOT continue to produce new books if no one buys it for 9 years, hype
or no hype. it's as simple as that.

...

No. Java libraries often provide very complex interfaces to simple tasks,
whereas Perl modules tend to provide simple interfaces to simple tasks.
Compare the two in, say, database access, cryptography, and XML parsing, if
you want some examples.

uh...then i suggest going back to them java books because database
access and xml parsing are not only extremely simple to do in java
(and there are about half a dozen cryptography books in java, but i'll
pass since i don't do that), they are ubiquitously used (e.g. we use
xml parsing all the time for internal web services as well as document
transformations). Even J2ME apps now have a standard xml parser, and
before had several tiny xml parsers. all it takes is for you to
include the relevant jar files then call the classes that'll do the
work for you - black box programming, which is the way it should be.

as an example, please, please show us how incredibly difficult it is
to do database access in java (perhaps it'll take one a whole day to
set one up, eh? is it that difficult? perhaps we need PhD minds to get
one going?)- hey, there are actually so many ways to do it...java
gives you that you know - choice! you could use the time honored JDBC
classes, CMP, the newest JDO, and for xml storage, JAXB. and of
course, you could simply serialize the objects into storage. oh my
god! perhaps that's why there are so many java books, it's because
there are so many choices and different things to explore!

i first started working on servlets in the late 1990s, and guess what,
i used online docs from javasoft.com and got my first servlet working
in (and i'm guessing) about 30 min or so - the main problem was
setting up the open source servlet container i was using (i actually
forget now what that was, but it wasn't tomcat i think) because of bad
documentation.

if you look at the 2004 java books actually you'l notice quite a lot
of books are about open source java tools and implementations - stuff
like the mvc framework struts for example, that have spread like
wildfire.

 

[asj]

Who learns a programming language via books these days? Everything you need
to know is on-line.

good thing the publishers don't listen to you then and decided to make
money on it anyways.