Over the years I have a lot of experience with people and their opinions of technology, toolsets, programming languages, software architectures, and of course forums. These opinions come from all walks of life and range from "unix.com changed my life and got me though the university... thank you Neo!! " to "Neo, it's your fault that there is declining traffic at unix.com." I learned decades ago to listen to everyone, but in the final analysis I have to make decisions on what I think is best.

Here is a graph from Google trends for the keyword unix from 2004 to now, covering a 15 year period. In this graph, you can easily see that according at least to Google trends, the interest in unix has dropped nearly 95% since 2004. That is a huge drop.



Now, we look at Google trends comparing unix and javascript over the past year. Both trends show a decline, but what is remarkable is that the interest in javascript is about four to five times more than for unix, at least according to Google trends. My experience on YT is that its even higher, as there is a current explosion in the javascript library space.



If we look at the Google trend for unix v. javascript v. php we see a decline in all of these great technologies, but javascript shows a better and stronger trend line that PHP (or unix).



Finally, (for this post) here is the Google trend for unix v. linux over the past five years;



What is important to keep in mind, at least in my mind, is that it is natural for the traffic at unix.com and other mature tech forums to trend downward. The downward trend is not related to individuals or people, but the general overall technology trend.

A number of years ago, I was not very active on unix.com (busy with tech scuba diving and then coding for cybersecurity projects). The downward trend was very dramatic. However, recently the trend reversed and began to go up a bit after I created a decent mobile site (and most of the legacy sites in the same space do not have nice mobile sites), which brought the site up in Google search referrals because Google also penalizes when a site is not mobile friendly and responsive. However, I am not fooling myself thinking my coding at unix.com is going to reverse a dramatic downtrend in unix and linux interest. The world is changing rapidly.

Times have changed dramatically over the years, and most people do not need to create an account on a web site to get the information they need on older and mature technologies like unix and linux. They just Google and BOOM. It's there. The amazing cyber-library just works. No need to even login for the most part. The reason for this is obvious. There is already a mountain of information available from Google search from every corner of the web, in just about every language.

I expect the interest trend lines in unix and linux to continue to decline over the years as the interest in newer technologies rise and 90-something percent of unix and linux related questions have been already answered on the net, somewhere. This is the natural order of the universe and we should always remember to embrace change.

Occasionally someone comments to me that this is a "unix" site and not a "javascript" site. Normally, I remind them (falling on somewhat deaf ears) that very powerful javascript engines run in the unix and linux shell (for example node.js and the Javascript V8 engine written in C++) and so there is not that much difference from awk, sed or javascript from the "unix and linux" perspective except the fact that the younger generation tends to use more modern tools in the shell (like node.js) and the older generate tends to use the more traditional (older) tools in the shell.

In my view, it is strange for any great unix or linux person not to embrace javascript or python or any other modern software which runs in the unix and linux shell as much as they embrace awk, sed, curl and wget as tool sets. All these toolsets are written in C++, generally speaking, and run in the shell.

The only constant in the universe is change and it's important for technical people to keep learning new things. It's also good for the mind.

Over time, mature forums like this one will continue to lose traffic as the trend lines tend downward, knowledge is abundant and freely available in cyberspace and continues to expand, and new ways of learning and social interactions rise and fall. Most people I know go straight to a YT tutorial when they embrace a new technology these days; and also Google and read a lot of web tutorials.

On a typical day, I write most of my code in javascript orders of magnitude more than traditional unix shell scripts. Do I still love the unix shell? Yes! I work in the shell every day. Do I love the new tools like the C++ based server side Javascript engine V8 and node.js? Yes!! I use them in the unix and linux shell every day as well.

It's very cool to continue to learn new technologies and just because you love unix and the unix shell or you love some other mature software tool, there is still a lot of very cool modern things to learn like javascript, python and more.

Keep learning forever! Embrace change! Be happy!