The October issue of Dr. Dobbs Journal has a small article called Quantifying Popular Programming Languages. This article is unfortunately not available on-line for free. Dr. Dobbs surveyed web-based job boards to see what percent of the job postings contained references to specific programming languages, but they did not divulge which boards they surveyed. The survey lasted from July 2002 to June 2003. Only 16.4% of the jobs posted contained references to .Net, 5.35% mentioned VB.Net specifically, and 5.16% mentioned C#. Java ocurred in over 40% of the ads and C++ was in over 50% of the ads. Visual Basic was in 19.2% of the ads. Does this reflect a slow adoption of .Net? Or is this just an effect of the economy, or both? I have lurked around the MCAD usenet group and seen frequent comments about the lack of jobs specfically for .Net. Of course, my company is certainly not hiring (see my post here), and the project I am on is the only .Net project in the company. In my experience the benefits of .Net development are significant compared to what we were doing in the past, even for the customer. Are we just not getting through to the business decision-makers about where we need to go? Or should I really spend more time learning C++?
