I think it's less of a death and more of a maturing. Early on in technological cycles, things seem to be rather inefficient and require more resources than when they mature. I think there is other evidence of improved efficiency in software development.
Combine that with the .com bust and the current non-recession that we are now not in, and I think many people have left the profession (for a variety of reasons). This lines up with the recent reports of a drop in CS majors in US colleges.
Ultimately, it's less about Java, .Net,open source and blub and more about what you do with the technology.
That's part of what attracts me to HN. People here are more focused on getting things done, and not religious wars on programming languages (the requisite weekly Lisp posts ;).
On the original page, commenter Kim has a hypothesis:
Essentially, all results from Google Trends are normalized.... More and more non-technical people are using google and thus the percentage of searches for programming declines.
Sounds reasonable to me. These graphs don't even have units on the Y axis. They're useless without some idea of what they're measuring: absolute or relative numbers?
Somebody needs to read How to Lie With Statistics.
Hmm, I wish there was aggregation for search trends, I'm curious to see Baidu's statistics.
I'm a little surprised by the comments lambasting the lack of China's presence in the stats. Google isn't the dominant player in the Chinese search market and I don't think there is an entrenched competitor in the Indian market, so of course the results are going to be skewed.
[+] [-] bsaunder|18 years ago|reply
Combine that with the .com bust and the current non-recession that we are now not in, and I think many people have left the profession (for a variety of reasons). This lines up with the recent reports of a drop in CS majors in US colleges.
Ultimately, it's less about Java, .Net,open source and blub and more about what you do with the technology.
That's part of what attracts me to HN. People here are more focused on getting things done, and not religious wars on programming languages (the requisite weekly Lisp posts ;).
[+] [-] mechanical_fish|18 years ago|reply
Essentially, all results from Google Trends are normalized.... More and more non-technical people are using google and thus the percentage of searches for programming declines.
Sounds reasonable to me. These graphs don't even have units on the Y axis. They're useless without some idea of what they're measuring: absolute or relative numbers?
Somebody needs to read How to Lie With Statistics.
[+] [-] donal|18 years ago|reply
I'm a little surprised by the comments lambasting the lack of China's presence in the stats. Google isn't the dominant player in the Chinese search market and I don't think there is an entrenched competitor in the Indian market, so of course the results are going to be skewed.
[+] [-] airhadoken|18 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsaunder|18 years ago|reply