O’Reilly Media analyzed data on 2.8 million users of its learning platform to find out what developers want to learn in 2022 — and it’s no surprise that AI is the topic. received the most attention.
Natural language processing (NLP) content saw a 42% year-over-year surge, while the deep learning fundamentals category was the second most-used topic, with growth 23%, According to O’Reilly’s 2023 Technology Trends report.
Also: OpenAI is hiring developers to help ChatGPT write better code
A snapshot of O’Reilly learning trends based on an internal “unit viewed” metric, a measure of how many times IT staff and developers view ebooks, videos, and in-person training courses on the main subject areas.
While some topics boomed, others slowed: interest in reinforcement learning dropped 14%, while content about chatbots dropped 5.8%.
Mike Loukides, vice president of emerging technology content at O’Reilly, notes that the decline in view of chatbot learning modules “seems counterintuitive” but in hindsight makes sense. meaning, due to OpenAI’s interest in ChatGPT and GPT-3 and -3.5 large language models.
“The release of GPT-3 is a landmark event, a moment,” writes Loukides, “everything you’ve done so far is obsolete.” “We’re excited about what’s to come in 2023, although the outcome will depend heavily on how ChatGPT and its relatives are commercialized, as Microsoft moves to offer ChatGPT as a cloud-based service.”
O’Reilly’s ranking of popular programming languages shows some surprises. Java and Python are the leaders in the long run, with small gains, while interest in Rust and Go increased by 20% each. Go is the third most popular language, followed by C++, JavaScript, C#, C, Rust, the JavaScript superset of Microsoft TypeScript, R, Kotlin, and Scala. This order is quite different from the rank of RedMonk and Tiobe.
In terms of infrastructure and operational documentation, containers, Linux, and Kubernetes are the top topics. Containers grow 2.5%, while Linux and Kubernetes grow 4.4% year on year. Content about the service grid, part of the Kubernetes ecosystem, fell 28%, while content about Istio — the service grid implementation most closely tied to Kubernetes — fell 42%.
The top topics behind containers, Linux, and Kubernetes are DevOps, Docker, Terraform, Ansible, site reliability engineering, Puppet, service mesh, and Istio.
Interest in Terraform, HashiCorp’s “infrastructure as code” tool, surged 74%. “The goals of Terraform are relatively simple: You write a simple description of the infrastructure you want and how you want to configure it. Terraform collects the resources and configures it,” explains Loukides. picture them for you”.
Interest in learning about specific cloud players is dominated by Amazon Web Services, followed by Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and IBM Cloud.
While the big three dominate, all are down year-over-year: AWS down 3.8%, Azure 7.5%, and Google Cloud 2.1%.
Also: Memory-safe programming languages are on the rise
O’Really doesn’t know what caused the decline. However, Loukides points to a potential suspect that is talked about more these days: repatriation to the public cloud, where companies bring their cloud-hosted applications indoors.
“Cost is the biggest driver of repatriation; companies moving to the cloud often underestimate costs, in part because they have not yet succeeded in using the cloud effectively,” he wrote.
“While repatriation is certainly responsible for some of the decline, it’s only a small part of the story. Cloud service providers make it difficult to leave, which is ironic. could drive more content usage as IT staff try to figure out how to get their data back.A bigger problem could be that companies are pausing their cloud plans because they’ve heard of them. about repatriation or are postponing major IT projects because they fear an economic downturn.”
