I’m continuing my study on popularity of different server side languages, and made a few adjustments this year I’ll go over.  This is the exact searches I’m placing on the different job sites:

Keywords: “Ruby on Rails”, “PHP”, “ASP.NET”, “Python”, “Perl”
Location: “San Francisco, CA”
Search Radius: within 30 miles
Posting date: within 30 days

Paying attention to the search radius and posting date are new here, these are the defaults for the different sites:

Monster: defaults to 20 miles with no time limit
Career Builder: defaults to 30 miles within 30 days
Craigslist: doesn’t offer an advanced search so we can’t normalize that
Dice: defaults to 30 miles within 30 days

Both Career Builder and Dice default to 30 miles in 30 days, so I went with that. And there’s nothing I can do to specify the craigslist results, so really only Monster’s numbers will change here.  I did search Monster using the default settings, and the are those numbers:

Default criteria Monster numbers: Ruby 73, PHP 76, ASP 8, Python 135, Perl 9

The numbers are a bit different, but not significantly so.  So, I’m not going to include them in the table, and I don’t believe that’s a significant enough change to skew the results from the numbers from previous years.

One additional thing to note it that I no longer need to omit the . from ASP.NET on craigslist, though doing so didn’t change the number of results.

And, as a note to myself – I found a site that will calculate the totals and percentages for me, which saved a lot of time.

Site	RoR	PHP	ASP.NET	Python	Perl
2008 total	71 (5%)	860 (69%)	309 (24%)
2010 Total	193 (18%)	720 (67%)	158 (14%)
2011 Total (2273)	374 (16%)	1508 (66%)	391 (17%)
2012 Total (2085)	402 (19%)	1396 (67%)	287 (14%)
2013 Total (1889)	396 (21%)	1109 (59%)	384 (18%)
2014 Total (2003/5291)	412 (21%/8%)	1262 (63%/24%)	329 (16%/6%)	2167 (41%)	1121 (21%)
2015
Monster.com (364)	64 (17.6%)	111 (30.5%)	9 (2.5%)	175 (48%)	5 (1.4%)
Career Builder (346)	25 (7.2%)	59 (17%)	30 (8.7%)	154 (44.5%)	78 (22.5%)
Craigslist (1281)	61 (4.8%)	624 (48.7%)	44 (3.4%)	399 (31%)	153 (11.9%)
Dice (1833)	425 (23.2%)	234 (12.8%)	99 (5.4%)	756 (41.2%)	319 (17.4%)
Total (3824)	575 (15%)	1028 (26.9%)	182 (4.7%)	1484 (38.8%)	555 (14.5%)

Ruby is higher then it’s ever been, while PHP has gone down a bit.  ASP.NET and Perl took a huge dive – they’re roughly half what they were.  This is the second lowest I’ve seen ASP.  I only have last years number for Perl, so I can’t really deduce too much from this change.

In general over the years it looks like Ruby is gaining popularity, while other languages are just bouncing around.  This suggests to me that the newer Ruby is still finding it’s place, while the other languages are more settled in their positions in the marketplace.

I included totals on the job sites this year too, Dice ended up with the most – which isn’t surprising since it specializes in tech jobs.  With Craigslist right behind – which also isn’t very surprising since it’s the cheapest to list out of all the job sites here.