Sales of F# books

The book publisher O'Reilly wrote an interesting blog post entitled "State of the computer book market" which included a breakdown of programming books by programming language. We criticized their study before because it does not count books like OCaml for Scientists, which has been the world's best-selling book about OCaml since its publication, and also because they consider only units sold and not cost.

Wiley have gathered sales information about our book F# for Scientists and it is interesting to see how well F# is doing compared to the figures for general programming book sales last year that were quoted by O'Reilly.

A direct comparison shows that the 1,225 copies of F# for Scientists sold in Q3 2008 immediately places the F# programming language a long way ahead of all of the conventional functional languages (i.e. excluding C# and Javascript). The best selling conventional functional language in Q1 2007 was Lisp with only 557 books sold. Moreover, the Amazon sales rank of the book Expert F# is consistently slightly higher than F# for Scientists. So the total number of F# books being sold is likely to be at least 2,500 per quarter.

According to these results, the F# programming language is already far more popular than Ada, OCaml, C, Haskell, Scheme, Lisp and Groovy.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bjarne Stroustrup is catching up

Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of the C++ programming language, once famously said "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses". Interestingly, Bjarne has gone on the defensive in his recent lectures, completely changed his tune and is catching up with the conclusions that most former-C++ developers have arrived at. In a recent lecture Bjarne made many eyebrow-raising assertions. He is happy that people are no longer talking about C++ because that means it has succeeded. In reality, C++ demand in the job market has been in freefall for years and few new software projects are choosing it. He attacked computer scientists for copying data and said that "even babies don't do that", a very strange statement to make in a technical presentation. He also implied that other languages deep copy 10,000x10,000 matrices and claimed that a shared_ptr is "like an old fashioned garbage collector except it gets resource relea...
Read more

Does reference counting really use less memory than tracing garbage collection? Mathematica vs Swift vs OCaml vs F# on .NET and Mono

Image
Our previous post caused some controversy by questioning the validity of some commonly-held beliefs. Specifically, the beliefs that reference counting (RC) always requires less memory than tracing garbage collection (GC) and that tracing GCs require 3-4x more memory in order to perform adequately. We presented a benchmark written in Swift and OCaml and noted that the RC'd Swift implementation ran over 5x slower and required over 3x more memory than the tracing GC'd OCaml implementation. This observation disproves these beliefs in their strong form and even brings into question whether there is even any validity in the weak forms of those beliefs. After all, we have never seen any empirical evidence to support these beliefs in any form. We received a lot of criticism for that post. The vast majority of the criticism was not constructive but two valid points did arise. Firstly, although our result was anomalous it would be more compelling to see the benchmark repeated across a w...
Read more

Benchmarking in the web age

The TechEmpower website contains some fascinating benchmarks of servers. The results on this benchmark of multiple requests to servers provide some insight into the performance characteristics of .NET on a modern problem. Specifically, the C# on ASP.NET Core solutions range from 2.5-80× slower than fastest solution which is written in Rust. In fact, C# is beaten by the following programming languages in order: Rust Java Kotlin Go C Perl Clojure PHP C++ Furthermore, .NET Core is Microsoft's new improved and faster version of .NET aimed specifically at these kinds of tasks. So why is it beaten by all those languages? I suspect that a large part of this is the change in workload from the kind of number crunching .NET was designed for to a modern string-heavy workload and I suspect .NET's GC isn't as optimised for this as the JVM is. As we have found, .NET has really poor support for JSON compared to other languages and frameworks, with support fragmented across many non-stand...
Read more