Popularity of programming languages

TIOBE Software Community Index provides us with an indication of the popularity of programming languages. How the rating works is by calculating the hits on search engines such as Yahoo!, Google, MSN, and even YouTube. The number of hits determines the ratings of each language. The search query used is +" programming". You can read more about the index definition on their website.

I have been checking the website for a while now, and Java and C are the most popular (searched) languages. From the top 20, there were some languages that I did not even hear about, such as SAS, and only a few of them I ever used, like Java, C, C++, C#, a little of JavaScript, PL/SQL, and Lisp. From that list, my top 3 languages that I have never used and I would like to learn are Visual Basic, Ruby (on Rails), and ColdFusion (and more from Adobe if I were to have time). I remember reading something Martin Fowler agreed with once, namely that we should learn a new language each year. There are more functional and logical programming languages in the top 50 than in top 20. Will this change in the future? I doubt that. But I do expect some of those top 50 languages (between 21 and 50) will reach top 20 soon (especially the ones that deal with concurrency like Erlang since multi-processor programming will be the "next big thing" - pardon the cliche). Ralph Johnson wrote a great article about "Erlang, the next Java", how he entitles it: "Erlang is going to be a very important language. It could be the next Java".

U.S. Game Industry Salary

According to a survey by GameDaily, in the U.S., the average salary in the gaming industry for 2007 was $73,600. Breaking down by groups we have:

• The business and marketing side have an average salary of $101,848
• Programmers have an average of $83,383
• Game producers earned on average $78,716
• Sound designers had an average of $73,409
• Artists (that deal with art and animation) earned on average $66,594
• Quality assurance people had an average of $39,063.

In my opinion, an artist should earn more than a sound designer since for me in a game, the overall animation is more important than the sound. The salary for QA people is much to low. They make sure that everything works together like it's supposed to. If a bug is discovered in the late stages of the product, or even after deployment, the negative impact is even higher. Hence it is the QA guys that have the daunting task of discovering every little bug that hides in every little corner of your product. Related to this, I found an interesting (short and to the point) blog.

Kaspersky Mobile Security

Kaspersky Lab have developed an anti-theft system for Nokia S60 and Windows Mobile 5.0 or 6.0, aimed at protecting your private information, block malicious attacks, and guard against SMS spam.

With the anti-theft protection, you can block your smartphone or delete files, contacts, messages, and all of this remotely. In the event of a loss, you can send an SMS to block any further access to you smartphone until a pre-set password is entered. If you want to clear all your data, you send a different kind of SMS. Now if the thief will replace your original SMS Card with its own, the "SIM Watch" will prevent access to you data without the original SIM. Of course, if he is interested in your phone more than in your data, nothing matters anymore. Below is an image showing the anti-theft option:

With anti-malware protection, you can protect against intrusive SMS that contain adware; in this regard, SMS received from unwanted addresses, or containing inappropriate content are blocked. There is a blacklist where you can add phone numbers or unwanted text. MMS filtering is only supported on Symbian phones. Below is an image with the anti-spam option:

More information can be found here.

BlackBerry JDE Plug-In for Eclipse

RIM came out with a beta version of the BlackBerry JDE Plug-In for Eclipse. You can now develop applications for the BlackBerry using my favorite IDE, Eclipse. The plug-in contains a subset of the features included in the BlackBerry Java Development Environment.

From the press release: "RIM values the Eclipse development community and recognizes the need for integrated tools that support the development of BlackBerry applications from within the Eclipse environment,” said David Yach, CTO for Software, Research In Motion. “The introduction of the BlackBerry JDE Plug-in for Eclipse builds on RIM’s robust offering of development tools to further enhance and simplify mobile application development for the BlackBerry platform."

Some of the characteristics are:

• Write, compile, and test Java Micro Edition-based applications that run on the BlackBerry smartphone.
• Simulates a wide range of BlackBerry smartphones.
• Includes several JSRs that you can use when developing your mobile application
• Leverages BlackBerry Enterprise Server
  

Read more about it here.

Google App Engine

With Google App Engine, you can upload your web application and not be stressed with maintaining the servers, everything running on Google's infrastructure. Some of the main features as written in the docs:

• dynamic web serving, with full support for common web technologies
• persistent storage with queries, sorting and transactions
• automatic scaling and load balancing
• APIs for authenticating users and sending email using Google Accounts
• a fully featured local development environment that simulates Google App Engine on your computer

You can download the Google App Engine SDK which includes a web server application that emulates all of the services of the App Engine on your own computer. In addition, there is a YouTube video on a demo describing how to develop and deploy an application on Google App Engine.

At this moment, Google App Engine is in preview release, so space is limited.

**UPDATE**
Google App Engine only supports at this moment web applications written in Python. Other languages will be supported in the future.

World preferences for social networking websites

From O'Reilly Radar, a view of social networking preferences per continent from Le Monde.fr:

Dimdim goes public

As I was writing in one of my previous posts, dimdim is a web meeting service where you can share an application, share your slides or your desktop, chat, broadcast your webcam, and what tops all this is the fact that everything is free. I gave dimdim a shot and described my experience with it, and now, it is open for everyone to use. Do go and give it a try; I'm sure after you use it, you will think twice before paying for Webex.