Last night at the Sydney Go Users’ meetup, Jason Buberel, product manager for the Go project, gave an excellent presentation on a product manager’s perspective on the Go project.

As part of his presentation, Buberel broke down the marketplace for a programming language into seven segments.

As a thought experiment, I’ve taken Buberel’s market segments and applied them across a bunch of contemporary languages.

Disclaimer: I’m not a product manager, I’ve just seen one on stage.

Language Embedded and

devices1 Systems and

drivers2 Server and

infrastructure3 Web and mobile4 Big data and

scientific computing Desktop applications5 Mobile applications Go 0 0 3 2 1 16 1 Rust 1 1 0 2 0 26, 11 0 Java 214 0 2 3 3 27 3 Python 1 0 312 3 3 26, 10 0 Ruby 0 0 3 3 0 16 0 Node.js (Javascript / v8) 113 0 0 2 0 0 28 Objective-C / Swift 0 3 2 29 0 3 3 C/C++ 3 3 3 2 3 3 2

Is your favourite language missing ? Feel free to print this table out and draw in the missing row.

Scoring system: 0 – no presence, lack of interest or technical limitation. 1 – emerging presence or proof of concept. 2 – active competitor. 3 – market leader.

Conclusion

If there is a conclusion to be drawn from this rather unscientific study, every language is in competition to be the language of the backend. As for the other market segments, everyone competes with C and C++, even Java.

Notes: