Watch for all sorts of follow-up, discussion (and possibly a shouting match or two) over at O’Reilly Radar, where Tim O’Reilly starts a series of articles titled Programming Language Wars. In Part One, he presents a graph comparing book sales on computer languages between January 2006 and January 2007, based on data from the Bookscan Top 3000 Report (click to see it at full size):
Tim writes:
As you can see, books on every language but Actionscript (Javascript for Flash), JavaScript, Ruby, and SQL were down, some more than others. Ruby books did outsell Python books. But Javascript — driven by everything Ajax — was the biggest winner.