You cannot post to a blog on a regular basis without obtaining somewhat of an (unhealthy) obsession with statistics. There are just too many fascinating tools available. I am a recovering addict which should give me more time to actually write articles and code. But some interesting observations can be made about Visual Basic versus C# and Java, the C# job market and where all these C# developers actually live.

Visual Basic or C#?

In Australia C# developers might be tempted to look down upon Visual Basic developers , I hold no such prejudice. The right tool for the job, and if that is Visual Basic why not? Visual Basic is however sliding when compared to C# as shown by Google trends. Somewhere in January 2005 C# became more popular when comparing Visual Basic to C#.  But not because of any spectacular growth in interest in C#. Queries about Visual Basic programming have declined and continue to do so.

Placing it next to an island sized cup of coffee, Java.

Google trends is of course less than accurate when comparing C# to Java. Searches for Java include all those Indonesian holiday bookings and of course, worldwide caffeine addicts looking for their next shot of coffee. There is no simple way to filter those searches out, but overall there is a decrease in the number of searches for Java. So is this good news for those who invested their time in learning C#, or is the world wide coffee market in decline?

I had a quick look at Monster.COM and to add some more unscientific research to this article: currently there are 90 C#/.NET developer job openings and 197 Java job openings in the San Francisco bay area. I would recommend holding on to that “Java for Beginners” handbook for now.

So where do all those C#/.NET coders live?

India, South Africa and Israel are the countries with the most C# searches, the no.1 city for C# searches is Redmond in Washington state (do I wonder why?) closely followed by Banglore in India. My own home country (Holland) is nowhere to be found so I guess this means that my future job prospects are not looking all that healthy.

Looking at the Google Analytics map for this blog, the No #1 source of visitors is the USA (30%), but it is again followed in second place by India(8%) (you are very welcome everyone!).

To end this post on a positive note with a prediction for the remainder of 2009:

Image credit: Ezu

This is a post from Martijn's C# Coding Blog.