In case you're wondering what the "in" languages will be for 2003, I'll post some thoughts here ... over the Christmas / New Year period, I've been analysing our log files, looking through the bookshelves in Washington DC to see what's happening "over there" (I'm based in the UK), reading the press, etc.

Of the topics that I follow particularly closely (i.e. subjects I teach), there seems to be a continuing growth in interest in PHP and especially MySQL, where everyone seems to be writing a book and search engine hits to our web site are much increased.

Perl remains steady;  it's always been a lot more prevelant than you might think, and there's a good steady flow of search hits and good bookshop coverage.  Perl is rathe more mature that MySQL and PHP,  and so the lack of growth is no suprise - indeed, there's a lot of folks out there who know Perl and are no longer the big searchers on the subject nor the big buyers of the books - they know the language now!

Tcl/Tk generates a significant number of web site hits, but there's little to find on the shelves at the bookshops.  No great change in that - it will continue to be an important but thinly-spread language.  Ruby seems to be quiet all round, and I would now be suprised to see it take off as a major player.  It has at least made a significant contribution to the thoughts of the Perl 6 team - there's a thread on that in the Ruby forum from a couple of months back.

"And what of Java" you ask?  Well, everyone's written Java books, everyone has Java on their web site (so our web site hit rate on the topic is lower than you might expect - lots of competitor sites out there!) but I think the jury's still somewhat out;  let's see how things work out as Java competes with .NET shall we?

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