Even though there are many articles regarding which language is the most popular, I like to focus specifically for the web which is the field I am most interested. I've started by checking some of the biggest job boards. I've checked:
It's August and I picked a random day. If you do the test I describe here, the numbers will be different, I just want to see what technology most startups are currently using.
The way that I tested is really easy, I went to the job search, typed the name of the framework and see the total number of jobs or mentions this specific technology has. I tested the following frameworks: Ruby on Rails, node.js, Django, Laravel, Scala/Play (I searched scala because play is a much more general word), Spring MVC. I didn't test C# as this is a general-purpose language which is used equally for web as for other things (desktop apps etc.). Also, I wasn't sure which framework is the most popular in Java and in PHP so I've included what I found from the google trends and from random blog posts. I also chose these as they seems to be the most updated.
oDesk
Number of jobs available:- Ruby on Rails: 369
- Node.js: 206
- Django: 152
- Laravel: 121
- Spring MVC: 29
- Scala/Play: 26
Angel List
Number of jobs available:- Ruby on Rails: 916
- Node.js: 418
- Django: 202
- Scala/Play: 95
- Laravel: 13
- Spring MVC: 1
Github Jobs
Number of jobs available:- Ruby on Rails: 35
- Django: 22
- Node.js: 17
- Scala/Play: 11
- Laravel: 1
- Spring MVC: 1
freelancer.com
Number of jobs available:- Spring MVC: 47
- Ruby on Rails: 44
- Node.js: 17
- Laravel: 13
- Django: 10
- Scala/Play: 3
Hacker News
Well, there isn't a search in this so I trusted the below: You can take a look at hacker's news trending where it compares Rails, node,js, Django and php. One other "way" for finding the mentions is by using browser search (which isn't very accurate but here are the results):- Rails: 102
- Scala: 74
- Django: 57
- Node.js: 51
- Spring: 11
- Laravel: 1
Conclusion
I am thinking to automate this procedure with a script and post every month my results. If you found any flaw in the procedure I will be happy to discuss and improve it. I know that my method is depending on the day and time and it can't be super accurate, except if you take a sample more often.What I see as a more general conclusion is that rails is in most cases number one right now as a web backend even if ruby hasn't catch up on the top 5 five languages (it is on the top 10 though). This example shows us that it is different to compare languages in general than comparing specific technology fields and see which one is the most popular. For example in game development for desktop I think that the king is undoubtedly C++. So I think comparisons like the above are much more interesting when you deciding career than testing which languages are most popular.