The Popularity of Programming Languages in Africa

Will Larson put together this study at Irrational Exuberance that explores the global popularity of programming languages. The languages he chose to look at were: Common Lisp, Erlang, Groovy, Haskell, Java, Objective C, OCaml, Perl, Python, Ruby, Scala, and Scheme. He performed the search using Google Insights, then restricted them using the programming filter.

This being a blog about programming and software development in Africa, I analyzed his charts and found some interesting results.

Common LISP

Erlang

Common LISP and Erlang have healthy followings in South Africa and Egypt.

Groovy

South Africa also shows a somewhat unexpected strong use of the JVM language Groovy.

Haskell

In addition to Egypt and South Africa, Haskell also surprisingly shows up in respectable numbers in Morocco.

Java

Java showed up as one of the top three languages used in Africa with Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, Morrocco, Algeria, Kenya, and Senegal representing with the most projects. This should be too surprising, it’s also the leading choice for mobile application development in Africa.

Objective C

Objective C was weak showing up only in South Africa and Egypt.

OCaml

Who knew developers South Africa, Algeria and Morocco were this fond of Objective Caml? Someone should start a group called Camel Riders for OCaml.

Perl

Perl is represented quite strongly by developers in South Africa, Kenya, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia.

Python

If you’re a developer in Africa then you know Python is one of (if not the) choice language here for web and mobile application development. Will’s research reflects this with South Africa coming in 8th among the top ten countries! Kenya, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia also show up again though no where near as strong as their friends to the south.

Ruby

Senegal actually charted ninth among the top ten countries using Ruby! This is on a list with Japan in first place and India in third. Algeria, Morroco and South Africa also show up with respectable numbers.

Scala

According to these charts Scala is virtually unheard of (or at least unused) in Africa. The only country that even registers for use from the region is South Africa and rather weakly.

Scheme

Scheme is fairly well represented by South Africa, Morroco, Egypt, South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya.

Will offered the following review of his charts:

In the end, these charts don’t provide much in the way of macro-insight. I’m not surprised that Ruby is most popular in Japan (although the fact that it is nearly as popular in Belarus is unexpected), nor am I surprised that Russia is so strongly represented. Instead, perhaps these charts provide some evidence for already held beliefs. Did you think that much of Java programming is being farmed out to India? Well, that seems likely since India has the highest search density for Java (and many of the other languages in the top ten searchers for Java are nations with a low per capita income).

But it also provides some interesting tidbits. Would you have thought that India also has the highest search density for Objective C? Or that Jamaica has five times the search density of the United States for Haskell? Or that the highest that the United States ranks is the 5th position, and for Perl

Diana commented and made some valid criticisms:

The leaders in the chart are countries that don’t often get programming literature translated fast enough in their language, or would rather find information online than buy a book on the matter (especially when books are at $30). Engineers there are more prone to look for information online than lets say American or Western European engineers. At the same time, it is clear that some countries, like India and Russa, may have more software engineers than others. That does not demonstrate that the language is more popular there, its just that they have a higher number of engineers period. While both Java and Objective C are popular in India according to these charts, who is to say Objective C is not used by 20% of the engineers only while Java is used by 90%. I’m not sure the charts are really telling much.

While, it’s important to note that this isn’t the most accurate study of what’s going on worldwide, it is quite interesting. Measuring the density of search from countries at least shows us one analysis. At the very least we know which countries are showing the strongest interest in a particular subject. Where there are interested developers, practicing developers are probably not too far behind. Google Insights can only measure what people are searching for (restricted by the programming modifier), and not the actual projects they’re using or deploying.

In Review

According to the results of these charts South Africa, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Nigeria and Kenya are leading the region in overall application development.

South Africa is clearly has the most active development scene in Africa.

Senegal made a surprisingly strong showing for the region with it’s Ruby research.

The leading languages among African developers are Java, Python, Perl and Scheme(?).