Another Scala popularity benchmark June 28, 2012

I’m not sure if you all know, but there is this Google programming contest called Google Code Jam. In the company I currently work for, we have a parallel and unofficial contest where the winner gets a full case of beer. I didn’t win this year, and I’m not going to tell you about how bad I turned out. I just thought that taking the stats from several years of Google Code Jam, could show the trends for some languages popularity and adoption. So here’s the chart that shows a popularity change of main alternative JVM languages (the Y axis is a percentage of contestants using particular language in the qualification round and the X axis is the year of the contest):

Looks great isn’t it? Scala’s popularity is skyrocketing. Well … unfortunately it’s only true in this chart’s micro world. The trend is there and it’s really strong. Community is growing. New books are published (this year we’ve already seen Scala for the Impatient and Scala in Depth and there’s more coming). But if we add another widely accepted language to this chart, we will see how far is it to reach another milestone. For this purpose I chose Ruby (I’ve used logarithmic scale, to better show trend relationships). Putting Java there would’t make sense - it’s too far away. Gaining Ruby’s popularity level is a reasonable mid-term goal in my opinion.

As you can see it doesn’t look so bright anymore. Google Code Jam might not be representative and the volume of data might not be large enought to draw an accurate conclusion, but I think that these charts confirm what most of us (Scala programmers) feel - Scala is great, the situation is good and we’re growing, every day more people try and like using Scala, but we are not there yet.

Thanks for reading.