Language job trends
Based on someone else’s tweet I spent a few minutes diddling with the Indeed job graph widget and thought this was actually a pretty interesting graph of a bunch of functional languages that are hot and in relatively the same scale job-wise:
| scala, clojure, erlang, F#, Haskell, Lisp Job Trends | scala jobs – clojure jobs – erlang jobs – F# jobs – Haskell jobs – Lisp jobs |
In particular, you can see in this data:
- Lisp is strongest going back a few years but is relatively flat.
- Haskell is next strongest and has been enjoying slow growth.
- Erlang took off at the beginning of 2008 and continues with solid growth, no doubt from the importance of messaging and NoSQL factors.
- Scala had a minor wave along with Erlang in 2008 and then shot out of the cannon in 2009.
- F# also started to hit the awareness in 2009 and I suspect it’s primed for strong further growth in the next couple years.
- Clojure is the latest entrant with things just kicking off last summer.
If you switch to relative graph mode, you can get a better feel for these growth inflection points:
| scala, clojure, erlang, F#, Haskell, Lisp Job Trends | scala jobs – clojure jobs – erlang jobs – F# jobs – Haskell jobs – Lisp jobs |
And at the suggestion of someone on Twitter, if we add Groovy to the mix you can see the obvious strong interest in alternatives closer to Java:
| scala, clojure, erlang, F#, Haskell, Lisp, Groovy Job Trends | scala jobs – clojure jobs – erlang jobs – F# jobs – Haskell jobs – Lisp jobs – Groovy jobs |
But then of course comparing to Java as a whole you start to understand the bigger forces at work:
| scala, clojure, erlang, F#, Haskell, Lisp, Groovy, Java Job Trends | scala jobs – clojure jobs – erlang jobs – F# jobs – Haskell jobs – Lisp jobs – Groovy jobs – Java jobs |
UPDATE: By popular request, here’s a graph with Java, C#, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Groovy.
Hi! My name is Alex Miller and I live in St. Louis. I write code for a living and currently work for 
I’m enjoying these small blog posts about Clojure. Keep them up as you learn more!
Hi Alex,
Thanks for getting Python in picture. However I would have loved to see a comparison chart of the _actual_ functional languages out there – Python, Clojure, Ruby and Haskell (both graph types). That’d be very nice.
@Rahul: I’m not sure what you mean by “actual” but I can’t create every possible permutation of charts. You can click through any of them and create your own variant. Python and Ruby are on the chart above and I suspect Haskell and Clojure are indetectable on a chart with those included.
@Alex by “actual” I meant the languages people are actually using computationally intensive apps. The biggies in FP. I may be wrong about the list but so far every other place I’ve seen these 4 up there sloggin it out.
and Oh, silly me, I had no idea these charts were generating on the fly and I could check on my own. Sweet!
@Rahul: I think you’re wrong about the list. :) First, if you’re going to narrow the domain to “computationally intensive apps”, I suspect that Ruby is probably not on that list. And I would add Ocaml, Erlang, and Scala (based on people and projects I’m aware of). Although I suspect most “computationally intensive” apps today are actually not written in FP at all and are actually Java or C/C++.