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The use of scripting languages is on the rise in North America, according to a recent report from research company Evans Data.
After surveying more than 400 developers in November, Evans Data found that scripting languages were being used by 56 percent of those who responded. More than half of those developers said they use scripts less than 20 percent of the time.
However, according to the survey, the number of users and the amount of time they spend using scripting languages are expected to increase in 2008.
In addition, the Evans survey showed that while Windows remains dominant for mainstream language users, scripting language users are more likely to look at other environments. The survey showed that less than half of the developers using PHP, Ruby or Perl are targeting Windows, while Linux was a strong target and platform for PHP and Ruby users.
Meanwhile, the survey also showed that 51 percent of North American developers use agile development techniques of some sort.
Other survey findings showed that 54 percent of respondents write multithreaded applications to take advantage of multicore processors. However, the biggest obstacles to building applications for multicore environments are the complexities of parallel programming and a lack of tools, the survey indicated.
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