Programming Language Popularity by Region
I wrote a scraper that records demand for different programming languages on craigslist job postings. I’m checking the Internet Engineering and the Software/QA/DBA categories for the five SF Bay Area regions as well as Manhattan. As expected, Perl and JavaScript are more popular in San Francisco than the surrounding suburbs, and C++ is quite in demand in the south bay.
Here are the results for the front-page Internet Engineering jobs, as of Tuesday night. Note that the Peninsula and North Bay regions returned fewer than 100 jobs, and some job postings list multiple languages.
sfc sby eby pen nby mnh
actionscript: 2 0 0 0 2 7
c++: 8 33 5 22 2 16
java: 33 26 16 38 5 37
javascript: 22 11 16 19 6 31
jsp: 18 11 7 17 0 18
matlab: 0 0 1 1 0 0
perl: 25 12 6 18 2 16
php: 20 5 6 15 4 33
python: 11 0 1 14 0 9
ruby: 10 2 0 2 1 7
sql: 47 45 21 33 8 44
vb: 5 5 3 1 1 6
linux: 33 34 6 40 5 23
unix: 22 33 6 33 2 26
windows: 16 13 11 10 3 9
total jobs: 100 100 41 100 17 100
Here are the results for Software jobs:
sfc sby eby pen nby mnh
actionscript: 1 0 2 0 1 5
c++: 30 41 31 25 18 24
java: 45 35 33 44 37 35
javascript: 22 8 17 13 15 17
jsp: 11 12 11 15 13 3
matlab: 0 0 0 1 0 0
perl: 28 13 16 12 11 14
php: 9 4 5 5 2 9
python: 9 5 11 6 3 3
ruby: 7 0 3 2 2 3
sql: 47 20 35 43 31 55
vb: 3 2 4 2 11 14
linux: 32 25 30 32 14 10
unix: 27 19 19 25 15 12
windows: 17 22 27 25 26 15
total jobs: 100 100 100 100 84 100
It would be interesting to keep track of trends, but craigslist probably doesn’t want me scraping their site every day. Would you find this information useful? If I run this test again, what programming languages should I add? And what regex would you use to grep for c?
WWW::Mechanize rocks!
Filed under: all talk, no code · 10 Comments
If I was going to do this again, I would add C#. Also, I would either add BSD or remove the operating systems completely.
To me, some interesting languages to add would be Objective-C, Cocoa, Verilog, and G-code, but those would probably only get results in the south bay.
Another way to implement this would be to just use CL’s search engine to search for each language in each neighborhood, and grep for the Found: string.
interesting…why would you expect Perl & Javascript to be more popular in SF than elsewhere? (also, kind of off topic, but we’re looking for a good java person :)
I guess that assumption is what motivated me to look into this. All the low-level assembly/c programmers I know work in the south bay. They are employed by companies doing firmware development, signal processing, optimization, etc.
All the perl hackers I know work in SF. They are employed by the financial or biotech sector, or work as sysadmins. Also, the companies doing AJAX (should have added that term to the survey) are almost all in SF, so it makes sense that the Javascript and web folk are up here as well.
It seems Java is still popular everywhere.
^Heh, I tend to generalize a lot.
I wonder what kind of programmer Jesse is..? If he ever took a break from working, he might be able to answer for himself :)
I’m going to call him a Cocoa programmer, which makes him the only Cocoa programmer I personally know who is working in SF (vs. 100s I know working in the south bay.. heh).
hmm. maybe he has a special friend that he’s not telling us about :-)
this is an interesting graph…
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/08/programming_language_trends_1.html
looks like Ajax, Ruby, and C# are on the rise.
Cocoa!!!
Objective-C !!!!
bash!!!
smalltalk!!!
css!!!
If anyone cares, I re-ran the parser today. Here are the results for Software/QA/DBA jobs:
sfc sby eby pen nby mnh actionscript: 1 0 2 0 2 5 ajax: 9 7 4 7 4 10 asp: 25 14 27 14 27 21 c++: 13 30 31 30 17 20 c#: 7 9 12 9 10 21 cocoa: 0 0 2 0 2 0 java: 41 23 26 36 37 44 javascript: 19 10 12 18 15 13 jsp: 18 15 7 11 16 11 matlab: 2 3 1 2 0 0 objective-c: 0 0 2 0 2 0 perl: 16 15 14 21 16 11 php: 10 7 6 8 2 8 python: 11 2 9 5 4 3 ruby: 5 2 1 3 2 3 sql: 57 24 42 40 42 50 vb: 8 4 6 4 8 6 linux: 17 29 30 28 25 15 unix: 29 17 19 22 28 13 windows: 24 29 29 24 23 10 .net: 24 20 17 9 13 25 total jobs: 100 100 100 100 100 100I assume “asp” will also match “asp.net”? Just so you don’t think “wow, that’s a lot of ASP jobs.” That also goes for matching “vb”.
Yeah, “asp” will also match “asp.net”, and “vb” will match “vb.net”, and “.net” will match “tikirobot.net”. It’s not very scientific :)