Inspired by an article by Andrew Chen about using Google Insights to look at adoption of some web apps, I decided to put together a similar comparison looking at the global popularity of programming languages. The languages I chose to look at were (in alphabetical order): Common Lisp, Erlang, Groovy, Haskell, Java, Objective C, OCaml, Perl, Python, Ruby, Scala, and Scheme. I performed the searches using Google Insights, and restricted them using the programming filter.

Let's look at some pictures.

Common Lisp

Erlang

Groovy

Haskell

Java

Objective C

OCaml

Perl

Python

Ruby

Scala

Scheme

Some ending thoughts

In the end, these charts don't provide much in the way of macro-insight. I'm not surprised that Ruby is most popular in Japan (although the fact that it is nearly as popular in Belarus is unexpected), nor am I surprised that Russia is so strongly represented. Instead, perhaps these charts provide some evidence for already held beliefs. Did you think that much of Java programming is being farmed out to India? Well, that seems likely since India has the highest search density for Java (and many of the other languages in the top ten searchers for Java are nations with a low per capita income).

But it also provides some interesting tidbits. Would you have thought that India also has the highest search density for Objective C? Or that Jamaica has five times the search density of the United States for Haskell? Or that the highest that the United States ranks is the 5th position, and for Perl?

Is there anything particularly interesting that you see in the charts?