Yes, the technology choices matter

O'Reilly books has published a report on “the state of the computer book market 2008”

O'Reilly used sales data to determine the health/strength of various computer languages used in programming. Based on that information, you can pretty easily see what is popular and what is not, etc.

Take a look: here is the link
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/02/state-of-the-computer-book-mar-22.html

I’ll point out two things. The number one language in 2008 was C# -- it overtook java of all things this past year. eoStar is completely C#, so that was very encouraging.

But they go on to classify groups of languages by sales figures… I’ll pick on the two bottom ones

I like this list. 1000-1999 units



So there were only 1783 F# books sold in 2009. O'Reilly still considers this immaterial.


But I saved the best for the bottom bunch. Take a look at this:



You will note a particular language of interest here is "RPG". I bring this up because RPG is utilized by several of eoStar's competitors as the choice for technology they use.

Let's look at the eoStar language table again..



What does this mean and why is this important?

Let's say your company goes with a software provider, for your core system, written in the "less than immaterial" languages such as RPG. Deciding on a system is a very big choice because it touches on so many parts of an organization. As a customer, I need to be confident that the decision I make is a good one. Now what happens if my RPG based vendor cannot get the resources they need (RPG programmers) when I ask them to get something done? My request is serviced in a not-so-timely manner, or worse, never at all. It's not that the RPG enabled vendor doesn't want to do the work, it is that they cannot get the resources (programmers) to do it because the language is dead in the technical world.

Evidence of growth, or lack thereof, for any computer language is highlighted by those providers of programming knowledge.

The eoStar system has been C# since the beginning. We've started with C# since the pre-v1.0 series and continue using it. The language is growing and soon C# 4.0 gets released out (we are already playing with it in the labs in CTP form). Having the sales of C# books overtake all other languages is fantastic from *our* business point-of-view because the developmental resource pool grows and is growing. That is good news for our customers because it means that the tools *we* use to create and grow eoStar are getting bigger and better. Our customers can look forward to continued innovation in the eoStar system because our tools get better.

The technology choices do matter.