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Update: Just found this nice dynamic chart created by @casron.

There’s a trending topic for programmers on Twitter right now: #Code2009. The idea is that you tweet and list all of the languages and environments that you’ve worked in this year. Seems like a great, simple way to quickly reflect on your past year and plan for next year. (I also like @rjurney’s suggestion to review your Amazon purchases.)

But with all those people participating in the #code2009 fun, I quickly got the urge to analyze the data. I couldn’t find a quick way to throw a tag cloud together for a given twitter search, but I did find the Search Cloudlet Firefox plugin that did the trick. Here’s the results as of a few moments ago:

Shows up pretty much as expected, I guess! Javascript, of course, has become The World’s Most Popular Programming Language, according to Douglas Crockford. Ruby and Python continue to suck all the oxygen out of the room in terms of what the Cool Kids are using. SQL only makes sense, as most databases are still RDBMS, much to the chagrin of the NoSQL movement (of which I’m rapidly becoming affiliated.) Java’s got a strong showing, but where’s .NET and their “enteprisey” ilk? I guess their offices block Twitter traffic ::snicker::

This was just a quick-n-dirty exercise for fun, of course. I wouldn’t read too much into it, and I really wish the tag cloud would go much deeper as there are clearly many, many more languages that are being tweeted but not represented here. Still, it is interesting how social media is putting more data and potential metrics at our fingertips.

And this whole exercise begs the obvious question: What will your #Code2010 tweet look like a year from now?

I gave a presentation on Cappuccino to the Atlanta Javascript Meetup on Thursday, December 10th at Ignition Alley. It was a lot of fun! We had a great turnout and I met a lot of passionate developers, despite clashing with the PHP, Python, and Cocoa meetups. In fact, I understand the Cocoaheads meetup actually included a talk on Cappuccino as well, and I’m curious what all was covered.

There was another talk before mine: Jenny Steele presented on Javascript Build Systems, and gave us insight into the process of evolving an appropriate build script for your unique project. This is a terribly important subject as Javascript continues to march into the realm of Something Real Developers Do (as opposed to the almost entirely copy-n-paste-based ecosystem JS has been for so long.) As we are now seeing, scaling isn’t just about your back-end and web stack: it’s actually largely about playing the HTTP and caching games correctly! JS build systems are your key to getting this step right and getting on with your business.

My talk was focused on introducing the Cappuccino project to our local developers. Have you ever set out to build a rich web app using HTML, Javascript, and CSS, found that you can get some interesting things working pretty quickly, but every next feature is harder and harder to bolt on? It’s still early and plenty immature, but I have been amazed at how well I can architect a nice web application using the tools WITHOUT the fear of the next feature breaking my app’s back. It’s good enough to start building apps today, and I have faith in the 280 North team to continue delivering on the tools, API, and most of all: productivity!

My slides are embedded below:

And the resource links to the project and some of the awesome apps people have already made with Cappuccino:

• Cappuccino Home
• Cappuccino Github
• Apple’s Cocoa docs
• 280 Slides (which I made my slide deck in!)
• 280 Atlas
• Almost.at