Google Trends, Java, PHP, Ruby, Python
Henry brings up a good question in the comments on the indeed.com comparison of the languages. While I don’t believe the trends in search terms are a good measure of job possibilities or job growth, they do indicate what people are interested in, or at least what they are having trouble with.
The lines, top to bottom are Java, PHP, Ruby, Python. Java’s popularity is waning and the other 3 seem to be flat lined. I picked the United States for the last 12 months. I was hoping this would help reduce the counts of searches for Java Indonesia, but it probably amplified the counts for coffee shops.
Before you get too crazy comparing the graphs here with the indeed.com trends, keep in mind that the indeed graphs show percent of change in postings, not total number of jobs. The intent is to show which markets are growing the fastest, not which are the biggest.
Read the graph as you will, Java is probably more popular than the other languages but I don’t think it is better, nor do I think it is growing. Java might be all but gone in a decade and we will be looking down on the current agile languages in favor of something better, faster, cheaper and wondering how on earth we put up with the ancient bloated tools like AJAX, Rails, Django, etc.