Scala and Go are winning emergent languages.

Do you want a programming job where you get to use a less boring language? More Erlang than Ruby, more Go than Java?

Do you want to know which emergent language should you bet on? Scala or Erlang? Go or Haskell?

To answer those questions I analyzed all job postings from July 2015 “Who is hiring” post on HackerNews (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9812245)

Here’s what I’ve learned:

Raw numbers: Scala: 36, Go: 27, Clojure: 16, Erlang: 7, Elixir: 7, Erlang+Elixir: 14, Haskell: 5

We can see that Scala and Go are ahead by a big margin. Haskell is far behind.

The methodology was painful but produces accurate data: I’ve Ctrl-F searched in the browser for each language and counted all jobs posts that mention a given language either as a requirement or as part of their current stack.

(Go was particularly hard to look for as “go” is part of many common words).

Raw data is at https://gist.github.com/kjk/3601df160d175bee1bc5

It would be enlightening to analyze past “Who’s hiring” posts to see trends.

I imagine Go is on a strong upswing (Scala is 12 years old, Go only 6 and popularity tends to grow exponentially, up to a point).