sutton036

According to Herb Sutter, C++ (and C and Fortran) are unmatched for performance per dollar and, therefore, he believes C++ will once again top the programming language charts as mobile devices make power consumption (which he equates with performance) a high priority again: Herb said this in his recent lecture  Why C++?  and other Microsoft employees from the Visual C++ team have called this prophecy the  "C++ Renaissance" . Similar statements about the superior performance of C++ were commonplace over 15 years ago when Java was new and unproven but we now know they were almost entirely wrong. The world migrated from native to managed languages over 10 years ago and never looked back because their performance is more than adequate. Furthermore, the implementations of managed languages have improved substantially since then and even toy benchmarks now show them competing with or even beating native code. Furthermore, the difficulty of optimizing large code bases means that...

Paolo from Italy pointed out that the number of blog posts on OCaml has continued to increase in recent years (6,420, 10,500 and 12,100 in 2007/8/9 according to Google blog search) and referred to the success of this year's OCaml meeting with 80 delegates in France. These are certainly encouraging results but it may be worth bringing more data to the table. Firstly, Google Trends can be used to graph the proportion of Google searches for different search terms over time. The following graph shows the trends for the keywords OCaml and F# since 2004: As you can see, the proportion of searches for OCaml (blue) is in steady decline whereas the proportion of searches for F# (red) is on the increase and the two crossed over in 2007. In fact, we have found that Google Trends correlates very strongly with our revenue. Secondly, we can examine statistics about the job market. The following bar chart illustrates the change in UK jobs from 2008 to 2010 for four functional programming langu...