It does not sum up!

As I recently discovered there are a lot of mature frameworks used in Java and other languages, I have considered leaving PHP behind and focusing on other language and possibly one of these frameworks for the next period.

A part of my research (which has not reached a decision!) was to compare a list of languages and database engines. Starting with the latter, which I've recently tickled in this article:

Hmmm... descending trends overall... how about scripting languages?

Hummm... descending again.

Google Trends is limited to 5 items per graph, so I left Ruby out, it's somewhere around Python, but the trend is just the opposite (it's slightly over Python since mid 2006 - well done, Rails! - and it's an overall growing search term). It's not a boost though.

There is a descending trend for searches on all languages (just search your favorite!) and database systems. I can only see two possible reasons here:

1. people know all about them, don't need to search (I will need 3 pints of Guinness to believe that)


2. people are less interested about them

Let's see how PHP stands in comparison with a few popular applications written in PHP: Joomla, SMF and phpBB.

Is this what we're missing? People are adding a new level of abstraction and being interested rather about frameworks and applications they can build on top of web languages instead of knowing the language itself?

If this is true, web programmers knowing the core languages will be fewer and fewer, there will soon be openings for "Joomla programmer" or "DJango programmer" or "Rails programmer" (Joomla has a framework too) and we will see a lot of unexperienced people doing easy routine programming jobs and finding a great challenge creating a simple database structure for a product listing site that does not run Rails or Joomla.

(which reminds me that I was bulkly invited earlier this year to become a SAP consultant for a company that scheduled 12 interviews in 2 hours, go figure what a coffee-drinking career I have missed!)