SitePoint Web Developer Survey Reveals Ruby on the Rise

I'd say 5.31% is pretty darn good.  It's suprising to me that it's above Python.

I got my copy emailed, didn't realise it was publically available so hadn't said anything hehe.

As ever with statistics though, it's important to take into account the sample group. Sitepoint is probably not a totally fair reflection of the entire web development community (although it is probably better than most), so it may just be that not many Python programmers visit. Python certainly isn't a focus/encouraged language for Sitepoint, as evidenced by the 'Perl, Python and other languages' forum.

Meanwhile, Ruby is the hot language of the moment and users demanded, so Sitepoint provided a Ruby-specific forum. This necessarily doesn't mean Ruby is more popular, but does mean that Ruby programmers after that point are probably more likely to stick around than Perl or Python programmers.

Not wanting to put a downer on Ruby - I love it and have never really looked at Python beyond glancing on my brother's screen when he's been showing off his latest program. The stats to me show that Ruby is definitely on the up and up (over 21% of people surveyed wanted more Ruby resources on the web), but I'm not sure it's more popular than Python (yet). That said, I have no evidence it's not either

There are some interesting findings in there besides language comparisons too, such as 36% of people building their own CMS rather than use a ready made option, or none at all. 28% are apparently still chugging along with static sites!

40% of people using Flash in projects surprised me (I wouldn't say anywhere near 40% of the sites I see around the web use Flash, so again suggests a bias in the Sitepoint content/audience although I've never noticed SP pushing Flash much). The percentage drops significantly for people planning to use it in the next year though.

The question on 'What best describes your primary involvement with the Web?' certainly helps show the slant in the answers - it surprised me how few employees of design firms seem to visit, suggesting the 40% owners/freelancers is largely freelancers.

Where do all the professional designers/developers working for design/dev firms go? A survey that included more of them could be an interesting comparison to the largely freelance/in-house audience Sitepoint seems to have.

Well, they haven't publicly announced it yet (though it seems they intend to)... and it did say in the email that you could copy entire slides into media coverage as long as you sourced it -- plus the email was just a link to the PDF, so no way to stop people from spreading it.

When you email it to 1300 people who blog (according to the survey), you gotta expect someone to link to it.

But consider that many of the people surveyed were freelancers who design or maintain more than one site each year.  If you create 20 sites in a year for clients, and one uses flash, you'd answer yes to "Do you use flash in your development work?" ... But only 5% of your sites uses flash.

That's really an example of a flaw in the survey than anything else (as I said, hardly scientific).  But definitely provided some interesting results anyway.

Also, for some perspective on the growth of Ruby over at SPF... The Ruby forum was added only after a huge number of Ruby (majority RoR) threads started appearing in the PHP, Java, and Perl/Python/Other Languages forums.  As a rule, SPF usually adds forums when there seems to be a demand for it.  I.e., they don't push any certain technology over another, it's just what the users create demand for.   Of course, it could be said that SPF would never have a reputation as a place to go for Python help because of the lack of a dedicated forum, but in the case of Ruby, it came to SitePoint rather than the other way around.   Which is encouraging to me, in terms of the growth of the language.  Rails really gave it a kick in the pants.