Market research company Evans Data has announced results of a recent study showing that use of the Ruby scripting language has increased by 40 percent amongst North American software developers during the last year.
According to Evans Data’s biannual North American Development Survey, 14 percent of North American developers use Ruby some part of the time, up from 10 percent in 2008.
Moreover, the survey showed that 20 percent of developers expect to use Ruby in the coming year. The survey measured the use of programming languages, including scripting and dynamic languages such as Ruby, PHP and Perl, as well as third-generation languages such as C, C++, C# and Java. The survey also looked at platform targeting and migration and other technology adoption, including cloud, Web services, SOA, parallel programming and agile development trends.
Click here to read about developers’ reaction to Ruby on Rails 2.3.
“The increasing adoption of developers using scripting languages correlates with today’s overall emphasis on Web-centric applications, which have to be highly malleable to rapidly changing market-driven requirements,” John Andrews, president and CEO of Evans Data, said in a statement. “Interestingly, while we see Linux continue to increase as a target platform, this category of development reflects the greatest growth in targeting a non-Windows target platform.”
Other findings from the survey include that 60 percent of North American developers use agile development methods some of the time. Also, 75 percent of the applications that developers are considering for the cloud will require audit trails. And commercial SQL databases are 2.5 times more likely to be used as a primary database than open-source SQL databases.
The Evans Data survey’s table of contents and sample pages can be found here.