The last 50 years of software engineering has proven that languages often come and go based on the type of problems the industry is tasked to solve (Fortran, COBOL) or the technology leaders of the time. This year, Python has gained the most marketshare:
Python has become the "de facto" standard in system scripting (being a successor of Perl in this), but it is used for much more different types of application areas nowadays. Python is for instance very popular among web developers, especially in combination with the Django framework. Since Python is easy to learn, more and more universities are using Python to teach programming languages.
While Java, C, C# or Ruby remain stable in 2010, while PHP, Visual Basic and JavaScript are losing ground. Relatively, Objective-C is the language that has the largest relative increase (more than 100% growth), while Python has the largest market share increase, in absolute terms.
Languages like Erlang or Scala are behind Prolog around the 50th rank. Groovy is 36th with 0.358% market share, which all things considered it quite large when you consider that SAP's ABAP is ranked 29 with 0.5% market share.
It is interesting to see the statibility of Java, C and C++ over the last decade despite .Net or the rise of dynamic languages.
Object-Oriented Languages are overwhelmingly ahead:
Object-Oriented Languages 55.8% +1.4% Procedural Languages 39.2% -2.1% Functional Languages 3.5% +0.4% Logical Languages 1.5% +0.2%
Statically typed languages are steadily regaining stength since 2007.
What's your favorite language? why? where do you think programming languages are heading for the coming decade?