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Is there a consortium,research organization or any credible reporting body that can confidently say what computer language will have more jobs in a given year and in years to come?.

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-1: "confidently say [anything] in years to come". What a poor question. If only we could predict the future, life would be so much simpler. Since we can't predict the future, what are you really asking? – S.Lott Mar 21 '11 at 15:49

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No. Even if we attempt to aggregate the details of popularity of individual languages, and look only at the overall market size, I'm reasonably certain the answer is still no.

I'll go even a step further than that though: even if we leave out the unpredictability of the future, I don't think anybody can even say with certainty how many programming jobs exist right now (nor how those are divided up among programming languages).

Most of the attempts at measuring anything like this (at best) measure secondary or tertiary effects believed to be linked to the popularity/use of that language, to at least some degree. I'm reasonably certain, however, that I've never seen anything approaching a controlled study that even attempted to determine the actual degree of correlation for any of those effects.

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I don't think anyone can "confidently say" what will happen in the future. This is especially true in the software industry where technology changes at a rapid pace.

The TIOBE index gives a decent approximation of what the most popular languages are at any given time, and which ones are trending up or down. This will (roughly) correlate to the corporate demand for programmers with expertise in the various languages.

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I would argue that the Tiobe index is actually quite a poor approximation of anything. If you want something like Tiobe, LangPop.com at least produces a known, reproducible quantity. – Jerry Coffin Mar 21 '11 at 14:48
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I don't have much of an opinion on which one is a better metric, but they don't seem that different to me. Both include Java, C, and C++ in the top three for instance. Also, for the purposes of the original poster, LangPop doesn't seem as useful in my subjective opinion. For instance, in years to come, I find it hard to believe there will be more jobs in Assembly than Objective C. – dbyrne Mar 21 '11 at 14:57
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Tiobe seems (to me, anyway) little more or less dependable than a reasonably informed person expressing personal opinions (and, in fact, we have nothing to prove it's really anything other than that -- they mention looking at numbers of searches, but never explain exactly how that relates to the final output). With LangPop, we can at least make informed decisions about what we trust (or distrust, as the case may be). – Jerry Coffin Mar 21 '11 at 15:05
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Evans Data http://www.evansdata.com/ does a good job about that as well. They do it using surveys. You can pay to get download the results or get it for free if you participate.

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