Koders.com: Ruby as programmers choice?

Open-source is what keeps most of the world ticking over. We've got open-source running on super computers, stock exchanges, schools and educational instutitions. The enterprise is where it's heading to now, if not already, as a cheaper alternative to heavy software licences.

After data was released on Koders.com, the leading open-source search engine from Black Duck Software, shows that Ruby is slowly but surely increasing amongst developers. Tens of thousands of people each day use Koders.com to search for code from a variety of open-source languages, and shows that Ruby is being used more and more than ever before.

Whilst many will be stuck using PHP, Python, Perl and ASP, Ruby has climbed the ranks of code search since 2004, fourth in line after Java, C/C++ and C#. From the press release sent to me the other day:

"Ruby, used in combination with the Rails framework, is rapidly gaining momentum and will reach 4 million developers worldwide by 2013, according to Mark Driver, research vice president at Gartner Inc. "Moreover, Ruby will enjoy a higher concentration among corporate IT developers than typical, dynamic 'scripting' languages, such as PHP," Driver continued."

Black Duck Software bought Koders.com in April 2008, and the searchable code repository has increased by 33% since. The code repository now surpasses that of SourceForge, CPAN and RubyForge, the dedicated open-source project database for the Ruby programming language.

More information and Ruby statistics can be found from the Koders.com Zietgeist.