What programming language would be best to create a location-based social app? (iPhone)
Real-time Web analytics has changed the nature of collecting, analyzing and reporting Internet data. As the name implies, it's a way to measure website traffic in order to understand and optimize a site's usage.
It used to be this was a specialized area, inhabited by a select few who knew their way around data well enough to tease out and report on the trends they found. No more. Today, the ability to collect and view data in real-time allows more people to get their arms around it. In publishing, for example, "they'd push a story out and forget about it and think about the next one," said Tony Haile of the analytics service Chartbeat, whose clients include the New York Times, Fox News, and Forbes. "What we're seeing now with the real-time Web is they're putting out a story but they're often iterating on it. They'll see a story is spiking (generating a lot of user interest) so they will draw out the audience and see what they can do with it. That ability to be much more adaptive is key to what's happening to the real-time Web."
Interested? Many programmers already have the skills they need to hit the ground running. "The core of our real-time engine is built in C, which is pretty much as old school as you can get," says Haile. "And then we combine that with things like Python and Tornado which are more conducive to real-time situations."-- Dino Londis
Real-Time Analytics Offer Real Programming Opportunities
Backlink: http://career-resources.dice.com/articles/content/entry/real_time_analytics_has_real
Programmers, take note. Infoworld's Peter Wayner has done a deep think about which programming languages are hot. It's a fascinating list, and he uses some pretty interesting logic to make his point.
A quick summary:
PythonIt was good enough to be the first language available on Google's AppEngine - a clear indication Python has the kind of structure that makes it easy to scale in the cloud, one of the biggest challenges for enterprise-grade computing.
Ruby, or more precisely the combination of Ruby with the Rails framework known as Ruby on Rails, is becoming increasingly popular for prototyping. Its entrance into the enterprise came on the heels of the Web 2.0 explosion, wherein many Web sites began as experiments in Ruby.
Built for mathematicians to solve systems of linear equations, MATLAB has found rising interest in the enterprise, thanks to the large volumes of data today's organizations need to analyze. Many of the more sophisticated statistical techniques that match people with advertisements, songs, or Web pages depend upon the power of algorithms like those solved by MATLAB.
JavaScript is not an obscure language by any means. If anything, it may be the most compiled language on Earth, if only because every browser downloads the code and recompiles it every time someone loads a Web page.
R is another Swiss Army Knife of numerical and statistical routines for hacking through the big data sets - collections big enough that it might be better called a Swiss Army Machete.
Does your server need to respond to many different independent messages concurrently? Do you need to parcel these requests out to different cores or servers in various parts of the world? That's practically the definition of the hardest part of enterprise computing. Erlang, an open source language first created by scientists at Ericsson Computing Laboratory, excels at these tasks.
Cobol jockeys today get to play with object-oriented extensions, self-modifying code, and practically every other gimmick. A recent search of Dice.com showed more than 60 jobs mentioning Cobol and 1,100 mentioning Ruby. The bulk of the jobs seemed to involve counting money (asset management) and counting doctor's visits (Health IT). While these are some of the same areas that first adopted computers for back-office processing, the work still needs to be done.
-- Don Willmott
Peter Wayner from InfoWorld wrote a story yesterday about the "7 Programming Languages on the Rise". Noting that the "mainstream is broad and deep," he says that most enterprise developers need to know one of the predominant programming languages, which he identifies as Java, C#, or PHP.
But he argues that a number of "niche languages" are beginning to gain in popularity.
Sponsor
Wayner lists the following as up-and-comers:
Some of these make sense: Google App Engine uses Python, for example. And we have written before at ReadWriteWeb about the increasing popularity of the open source statistical programming language R.
But, arguably, it's hard to see JavaScript, Ruby or Python as "niche" languages. And even harder perhaps to see COBOL, one of the oldest programming languages, as such - although the InfoWorld story points to a recent Dice.com search that listed 580 jobs mentioning Cobol, in comparison to the 1070 that referenced Ruby.
Do you agree with the list? If not, what languages should (or shouldn't) be on it?
And just as interesting, perhaps, what should be on the list of programming languages in decline?
Photo credits: Flickr user David Blaikie
Discuss
