12 ms·

How fast are JVM-based languages growing among developers?

63 points by MarinaSprava 15y ago

welp 15y ago
This talk[1] by sogrady (originally presented at FOSDEM 2012) has a lot of interesting statistics demonstrating the popularity of JVM-based languages, and how they have been growing. The numbers come from sources including HN, GitHub, Indeed.com and Ohloh. Definitely worth a glance through. [1] http://redmonk.com/public/fosdem2012.pdf http://redmonk.com/public/fosdem2012.pdf
- SeanDav 15y ago
  Very interesting link. Just wish people would use log scales or split graphs when trying to display data with orders of magnitude differences.
llambda 15y ago
As anecdotal/non-scientific polling and researching, this is certainly interesting. Perhaps the big take away for me is the OP's note that the JVM rather than CLR has become a big target for emergent languages where a few years ago CLR was billed as the future of cross platform endeavors. (Note that at least one of the Big Three, Clojure, now also targets CLR in a branched project.) Slightly disappointing is the fact that while Clojure scores highly among developers it doesn't seem to have made a proportionally large impact on the commercial space. However it's important to note that the OP only draws these conclusions from one source, Indeed.com, and I have to wonder how representative this is of the kinds of companies that might be hiring for Clojure related jobs: in other words, would they be on Indeed.com's radar at all? Finally, can we really draw any significant conclusions from these non-scientific points? Probably not, but it is interesting to wonder: there seems to be a good deal of momentum behind the JVM at this point and it will be an interesting, exciting future if Groovy/Scala/Clojure become leading languages. (Even more interesting is the prospect that they might all end up being leading languages...)
- pron 15y ago
  Clojure is 4-5 years younger than Groovy and Scala.
- Dn_Ab 15y ago
  Very interesting languages are being built for both the CLR and JVM. On the JVM the main ones I know of are Scala, Clojure and Kotlin. I think ClojureScript deserves mention even if a dialect due to the thoughts it allows one to think more easily (LightTable). The CLR also has lots of very interesting languages under development. Languages like F# and Nemerle. Microsoft Research also pump out cutting edge stuff like the dependently typed F* (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/fstar/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/fstar/) and in language support for probabilistic programming http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/fun/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/fun/. The problem with MSR stuff is that their licences are so cumbersome and restrictive.
  - ConstantineXVI 15y ago
    ClojureScript doesn't run on either the CLR or JVM; the compiler is JVM-based Clojure but the output runs as JS. And it's worth noting that Scala, Clojure, and Kotlin all originated outside of Sun; where F# originated from inside Microsoft.
    - Dn_Ab 15y ago
      Yes, that's why I made a note of its dialect nature. But I still count it as something that sprung from interesting work in the JVM community that deserves to be noticed on its own. In this case, the output as javascript is almost incidental, the more interesting results is the language-browser interaction it allows. It does not matter where the research got done as long as it's interesting and moves things forward. Anyways, the cultures of MS and MSR are so different, it is arguable if one can even consider MSR as part of Microsoft. Sort of like Hong Kong and China. MSR fund a lot of haskell work for example.
    - markokocic 15y ago
      Actually, ClojureScript worked just fine in Rhino, JS implementation that ships with the JDK, last time I checked.
rurounijones 15y ago
As a Ruby dev I am loving JRuby. It is fast, has access to serious app servers like Tomcat and JBoss as well as java libraries, multi-threading like a madman. I get warm fuzzies when I do load-testing and see the response times go down on a newly booted at as the JIT kicks in. Plus it works well on windows when I have no choice but to use a windows server. With new JVM language frameworks like vert.x and the invokeDynamic etc. additions in Java 7 I really really think the JVM is getting some good mindshare in communities that otherwise would not have touched it due to java.
- benmac 15y ago
  I wanted to love JRuby (Ruby 1.9 emulation) but bugs like this: https://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JRUBY-5529 https://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JRUBY-5529 causes HTTPS calls to services like Stripe to fail. That bug has been open for over one year now. Other bugs like this: https://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JRUBY-6181 https://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JRUBY-6181 cause Capistrano deployments to fail (but there is a workaround). Lack of a clean implementation of something as fundamental SSL libraries and the inability of the main committers to address those shortcomings pushed me back to a traditional Ruby approach.
  - rurounijones 15y ago
    Ouch, I must admit that I use JRuby on internal facing windows servers (no SSL required and, unfortunately, no capistrano) so have not run into these problems.
cageface 15y ago
If you take Indeed's data seriously, try plotting all of these languages vs Java and you'll see that they are all baseline noise compared to grandpa. In my opinion none of these pose any real threat to Java, for reasons specific to each. The only JVM language I've seen that is enough of an improvement to be worth the trouble but still accessible enough to the rank & file to stand a chance is Kotlin.
- thebluesky 15y ago
  6 years ago Ruby was also rapidly growing "baseline noise"... http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby&l= http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby&l= IMHO Kotlin is less of an improvement over Java than Scala is. Mostly the impression is Kotlin == the poor man's Scala
  - kaffiene 15y ago
    I think Kotlin has much more chance of being a Java++ than Scala. Kotlin is simple, pragmatic and powerful - which will appeal to the average Java developer. Scala is powerful but complex which is far away from the territory that Java was good at. You have to remember, that Java succeeded against the background of dominant C++ because it was much simpler and helped tame complexity better than C++ (less obscure ways of shooting yourself in the foot). Unfortunately, Scala returns us to C++'s days of making it easy to do something wrong (with the type system) without it being particularly obvious what.
  - cageface 15y ago
    It still is, practically. It's also not really directly competing with Java the way a lot of JVM languages are. Kotlin is indeed much less ambitious than Scala but, as much as I like Scala, I think it's just a bridge too far.
bad_user 15y ago
It's interesting that JRuby has the lowest popularity in this pool, being included as a "honorable mention". If I were to take a guess, that's because JRuby is used by many Ruby developers that want to use the JVM and its associated libraries and it is maybe used less by Java developers. Maybe that's because JRuby tries to be a Ruby VM first and a JVM language second. The difference is subtle, however it leads to important differences. For instance the preferred way of doing package management is to use RubyGems and Bundler, instead of Maven and its repositories or something based on it (compared to SBT or Gradle or leiningen). And devs when working with JRuby are using the same libraries as they use with Ruby MRI, because many libraries provide a JRuby-optimized backend. For example devs working with JRuby would rather use Nokogiri, which is used for searching XML/HTML docs with XPath/CSS3 selectors, instead of something Java-specific. So JRuby's ecosystem is more closely tied to Ruby MRI, rather than to that of the JVM, which is why I think this article is not really accurate and JRuby shouldn't really be on that fourth place. And out of these alternative languages, I love JRuby more because this is a language with multiple mature implementations, which isn't something many languages can brag about, and I don't have to be tied to the JVM and its ecosystem.
calinet6 15y ago
What is a "JVM-based language"? The JVM is simply a virtual machine. One could theoretically compile any language to run on this virtual machine. The popularity is a testament to the maturity and reliability and ease-of-use of the VM, but to say a language is a "JVM language" is no more accurate than saying that C is an "x86 language" simply because x86 is the most popular target architecture. Details details...
- thebluesky 15y ago
  What two word phrase would you use to describe the following set of languages {JRuby, Scala, Clojure, Groovy} without turning the headline into a full paragraph?
- batista 15y ago
  >What is a "JVM-based language"? The JVM is simply a virtual machine. No, it's more specifically a virtual machine designed, with the Java language primarily (if not exclusively) in mind. Where do you think the J in the JVM comes from? >One could theoretically compile any language to run on this virtual machine. And that language implementation would then be a "JVM based language". Duh!
- technomancy 15y ago
  Not all languages have a formal spec. Many are implementation-defined. You can turn your nose up at them if you like, but they still exist.
- chc 15y ago
  C happens to be most often compiled for x86, but the language isn't designed primarily to target x86. On the other hand, languages like Scala, Clojure, Groovy, etc. do intentionally target the JVM and tout Java interop as a feature. Other targets are secondary (or nonexistent) not just for the users, but for the language designers themselves.
diminish 15y ago
Hey everyone, we considered Clojure and JRuby for developing an open source web framework but gave up at some point due to Oracle's aggressive Java monetization crusade, currently against Google. Sun was a reliable partner for open source community but doesn't Oracle make you afraid while you develop anything java or jvm-related? Could you give us some rationale, why Oracle won't chase your future project or what you must do in order to be immune against being an aggressive target for Oracle, especially if your project grows to be noticeable?
- trimbo 15y ago
  > Sun was a reliable partner for open source community but doesn't Oracle make you afraid while you develop anything java or jvm-related? The suit is regarding an implementation of Java that did not pay for a license (Oracle's claim, not mine) -- not applications built on the JVM or Java. So I'm curious, what can they do that you fear? They give away the JDK/JRE for free. Ungodly mountains of code are developed on top of this stack. If they wanted to sue users of their software, do you think they'd start with your company, or Bank of America, JP Morgan, etc.?
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- thebluesky 15y ago
  Oracle may not have made many friends among Java devs, but it's pretty ridiculous to suggest that developing a Java app is going to put you at risk of anything. Have you violated the license terms of the JDK (GPL 2)? Unless your project is an incompatible Java fork you don't have anything to worry about. Has anyone EVER been sued for simply using standard Java? Can you picture all of IBM's Java-using customers being sued?
  - diminish 15y ago
    I am not talking about a simple app developed using Java, I am talking about making a JVM based framework based on a fork of JRuby and JVM. Is this against some license?
readme 15y ago
What this article misses is that the indeed statistics are potentially bogus since many job postings will include phrases like "Looking for a Groovy person" and are false positives, since the word groovy is an adjective here, not a proper noun.
- thebluesky 15y ago
  All statistics contain noise, but how many job postings are about groovy programming vs the obscure edge case you mention?
  - vorg 15y ago
    Job ads mentioning Groovy are usually for Java devs with Groovy as a nice-to-have addon skill, but job ads mentioning Scala are usually when Scala is the primary language.
vorg 15y ago
> Clojure fared particularly well (ahead of Scala and Groovy) in the poll I ran due to many of the voters coming from the LISP friendly HackerNews community. The DZone poll which drew a slightly larger number of voters (primarily Java devs. from the dzone community) favoured Groovy, with Scala in second place, followed by Clojure. In order to get a better picture of popularity spanning both polls I combined the results and plotted a chart. You don't combine results to get a better picture of popularity. You ask which of the two of them is less likely to be skewed with manipulated results. DZone is a grossly commercialized entity compared to hackerNews, with rings of users upvoting stuff they want to promote, and privileges for moderators of the "subzones". A better measure of popularity is O'Reilly's hard copy book sales for the year to March 2012: http://radar.oreilly.com/upload/2012/03/Lang_QTR_Units_PrevYear_a.jpg http://radar.oreilly.com/upload/2012/03/Lang_QTR_Units_PrevY... Just how would anyone fiddle that data?

63 points by MarinaSprava 15y ago

welp 15y ago

This talk[1] by sogrady (originally presented at FOSDEM 2012) has a lot of interesting statistics demonstrating the popularity of JVM-based languages, and how they have been growing. The numbers come from sources including HN, GitHub, Indeed.com and Ohloh. Definitely worth a glance through. [1] http://redmonk.com/public/fosdem2012.pdf http://redmonk.com/public/fosdem2012.pdf

SeanDav 15y ago
Very interesting link. Just wish people would use log scales or split graphs when trying to display data with orders of magnitude differences.

llambda 15y ago

As anecdotal/non-scientific polling and researching, this is certainly interesting. Perhaps the big take away for me is the OP's note that the JVM rather than CLR has become a big target for emergent languages where a few years ago CLR was billed as the future of cross platform endeavors. (Note that at least one of the Big Three, Clojure, now also targets CLR in a branched project.) Slightly disappointing is the fact that while Clojure scores highly among developers it doesn't seem to have made a proportionally large impact on the commercial space. However it's important to note that the OP only draws these conclusions from one source, Indeed.com, and I have to wonder how representative this is of the kinds of companies that might be hiring for Clojure related jobs: in other words, would they be on Indeed.com's radar at all? Finally, can we really draw any significant conclusions from these non-scientific points? Probably not, but it is interesting to wonder: there seems to be a good deal of momentum behind the JVM at this point and it will be an interesting, exciting future if Groovy/Scala/Clojure become leading languages. (Even more interesting is the prospect that they might all end up being leading languages...)

pron 15y ago
Clojure is 4-5 years younger than Groovy and Scala.
Dn_Ab 15y ago
Very interesting languages are being built for both the CLR and JVM. On the JVM the main ones I know of are Scala, Clojure and Kotlin. I think ClojureScript deserves mention even if a dialect due to the thoughts it allows one to think more easily (LightTable). The CLR also has lots of very interesting languages under development. Languages like F# and Nemerle. Microsoft Research also pump out cutting edge stuff like the dependently typed F* (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/fstar/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/fstar/) and in language support for probabilistic programming http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/fun/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/fun/. The problem with MSR stuff is that their licences are so cumbersome and restrictive.
- ConstantineXVI 15y ago
  ClojureScript doesn't run on either the CLR or JVM; the compiler is JVM-based Clojure but the output runs as JS. And it's worth noting that Scala, Clojure, and Kotlin all originated outside of Sun; where F# originated from inside Microsoft.
  - Dn_Ab 15y ago
    Yes, that's why I made a note of its dialect nature. But I still count it as something that sprung from interesting work in the JVM community that deserves to be noticed on its own. In this case, the output as javascript is almost incidental, the more interesting results is the language-browser interaction it allows. It does not matter where the research got done as long as it's interesting and moves things forward. Anyways, the cultures of MS and MSR are so different, it is arguable if one can even consider MSR as part of Microsoft. Sort of like Hong Kong and China. MSR fund a lot of haskell work for example.
  - markokocic 15y ago
    Actually, ClojureScript worked just fine in Rhino, JS implementation that ships with the JDK, last time I checked.

rurounijones 15y ago

As a Ruby dev I am loving JRuby. It is fast, has access to serious app servers like Tomcat and JBoss as well as java libraries, multi-threading like a madman. I get warm fuzzies when I do load-testing and see the response times go down on a newly booted at as the JIT kicks in. Plus it works well on windows when I have no choice but to use a windows server. With new JVM language frameworks like vert.x and the invokeDynamic etc. additions in Java 7 I really really think the JVM is getting some good mindshare in communities that otherwise would not have touched it due to java.

benmac 15y ago
I wanted to love JRuby (Ruby 1.9 emulation) but bugs like this: https://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JRUBY-5529 https://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JRUBY-5529 causes HTTPS calls to services like Stripe to fail. That bug has been open for over one year now. Other bugs like this: https://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JRUBY-6181 https://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JRUBY-6181 cause Capistrano deployments to fail (but there is a workaround). Lack of a clean implementation of something as fundamental SSL libraries and the inability of the main committers to address those shortcomings pushed me back to a traditional Ruby approach.
- rurounijones 15y ago
  Ouch, I must admit that I use JRuby on internal facing windows servers (no SSL required and, unfortunately, no capistrano) so have not run into these problems.

cageface 15y ago

If you take Indeed's data seriously, try plotting all of these languages vs Java and you'll see that they are all baseline noise compared to grandpa. In my opinion none of these pose any real threat to Java, for reasons specific to each. The only JVM language I've seen that is enough of an improvement to be worth the trouble but still accessible enough to the rank & file to stand a chance is Kotlin.

thebluesky 15y ago
6 years ago Ruby was also rapidly growing "baseline noise"... http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby&l= http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby&l= IMHO Kotlin is less of an improvement over Java than Scala is. Mostly the impression is Kotlin == the poor man's Scala
- kaffiene 15y ago
  I think Kotlin has much more chance of being a Java++ than Scala. Kotlin is simple, pragmatic and powerful - which will appeal to the average Java developer. Scala is powerful but complex which is far away from the territory that Java was good at. You have to remember, that Java succeeded against the background of dominant C++ because it was much simpler and helped tame complexity better than C++ (less obscure ways of shooting yourself in the foot). Unfortunately, Scala returns us to C++'s days of making it easy to do something wrong (with the type system) without it being particularly obvious what.
- cageface 15y ago
  It still is, practically. It's also not really directly competing with Java the way a lot of JVM languages are. Kotlin is indeed much less ambitious than Scala but, as much as I like Scala, I think it's just a bridge too far.

bad_user 15y ago

It's interesting that JRuby has the lowest popularity in this pool, being included as a "honorable mention". If I were to take a guess, that's because JRuby is used by many Ruby developers that want to use the JVM and its associated libraries and it is maybe used less by Java developers. Maybe that's because JRuby tries to be a Ruby VM first and a JVM language second. The difference is subtle, however it leads to important differences. For instance the preferred way of doing package management is to use RubyGems and Bundler, instead of Maven and its repositories or something based on it (compared to SBT or Gradle or leiningen). And devs when working with JRuby are using the same libraries as they use with Ruby MRI, because many libraries provide a JRuby-optimized backend. For example devs working with JRuby would rather use Nokogiri, which is used for searching XML/HTML docs with XPath/CSS3 selectors, instead of something Java-specific. So JRuby's ecosystem is more closely tied to Ruby MRI, rather than to that of the JVM, which is why I think this article is not really accurate and JRuby shouldn't really be on that fourth place. And out of these alternative languages, I love JRuby more because this is a language with multiple mature implementations, which isn't something many languages can brag about, and I don't have to be tied to the JVM and its ecosystem.

calinet6 15y ago

What is a "JVM-based language"? The JVM is simply a virtual machine. One could theoretically compile any language to run on this virtual machine. The popularity is a testament to the maturity and reliability and ease-of-use of the VM, but to say a language is a "JVM language" is no more accurate than saying that C is an "x86 language" simply because x86 is the most popular target architecture. Details details...

thebluesky 15y ago
What two word phrase would you use to describe the following set of languages {JRuby, Scala, Clojure, Groovy} without turning the headline into a full paragraph?
batista 15y ago
>What is a "JVM-based language"? The JVM is simply a virtual machine. No, it's more specifically a virtual machine designed, with the Java language primarily (if not exclusively) in mind. Where do you think the J in the JVM comes from? >One could theoretically compile any language to run on this virtual machine. And that language implementation would then be a "JVM based language". Duh!
technomancy 15y ago
Not all languages have a formal spec. Many are implementation-defined. You can turn your nose up at them if you like, but they still exist.
chc 15y ago
C happens to be most often compiled for x86, but the language isn't designed primarily to target x86. On the other hand, languages like Scala, Clojure, Groovy, etc. do intentionally target the JVM and tout Java interop as a feature. Other targets are secondary (or nonexistent) not just for the users, but for the language designers themselves.

diminish 15y ago

Hey everyone, we considered Clojure and JRuby for developing an open source web framework but gave up at some point due to Oracle's aggressive Java monetization crusade, currently against Google. Sun was a reliable partner for open source community but doesn't Oracle make you afraid while you develop anything java or jvm-related? Could you give us some rationale, why Oracle won't chase your future project or what you must do in order to be immune against being an aggressive target for Oracle, especially if your project grows to be noticeable?

trimbo 15y ago
> Sun was a reliable partner for open source community but doesn't Oracle make you afraid while you develop anything java or jvm-related? The suit is regarding an implementation of Java that did not pay for a license (Oracle's claim, not mine) -- not applications built on the JVM or Java. So I'm curious, what can they do that you fear? They give away the JDK/JRE for free. Ungodly mountains of code are developed on top of this stack. If they wanted to sue users of their software, do you think they'd start with your company, or Bank of America, JP Morgan, etc.?
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
thebluesky 15y ago
Oracle may not have made many friends among Java devs, but it's pretty ridiculous to suggest that developing a Java app is going to put you at risk of anything. Have you violated the license terms of the JDK (GPL 2)? Unless your project is an incompatible Java fork you don't have anything to worry about. Has anyone EVER been sued for simply using standard Java? Can you picture all of IBM's Java-using customers being sued?
- diminish 15y ago
  I am not talking about a simple app developed using Java, I am talking about making a JVM based framework based on a fork of JRuby and JVM. Is this against some license?

readme 15y ago

What this article misses is that the indeed statistics are potentially bogus since many job postings will include phrases like "Looking for a Groovy person" and are false positives, since the word groovy is an adjective here, not a proper noun.

thebluesky 15y ago
All statistics contain noise, but how many job postings are about groovy programming vs the obscure edge case you mention?
- vorg 15y ago
  Job ads mentioning Groovy are usually for Java devs with Groovy as a nice-to-have addon skill, but job ads mentioning Scala are usually when Scala is the primary language.

vorg 15y ago

> Clojure fared particularly well (ahead of Scala and Groovy) in the poll I ran due to many of the voters coming from the LISP friendly HackerNews community. The DZone poll which drew a slightly larger number of voters (primarily Java devs. from the dzone community) favoured Groovy, with Scala in second place, followed by Clojure. In order to get a better picture of popularity spanning both polls I combined the results and plotted a chart. You don't combine results to get a better picture of popularity. You ask which of the two of them is less likely to be skewed with manipulated results. DZone is a grossly commercialized entity compared to hackerNews, with rings of users upvoting stuff they want to promote, and privileges for moderators of the "subzones". A better measure of popularity is O'Reilly's hard copy book sales for the year to March 2012: http://radar.oreilly.com/upload/2012/03/Lang_QTR_Units_PrevYear_a.jpg http://radar.oreilly.com/upload/2012/03/Lang_QTR_Units_PrevY... Just how would anyone fiddle that data?