I was a bit surprised by this because I would have expected there to be lesser and lesser "stand-alone applications" (desktop applications) being developed amd more web applications.
For web application development, I'd expect PHP/RoR to have a bigger footprint.
I see your point. One reason could be, that while there might be less stand-alone applications under development (just an assumption, I don't know whether it is so), nowadays lot of them are big apps required a lot of programmers (for example in the project I work on, there are several hundreds developers ;-). In the web apps world, the teams are usually slimmer.
There may well be less stand alone applications being developed, but I have a hunch that the number of developers needed in a desktop application startup is substantially higher than the number of developers needed for a web application.
If the scripting languages that are used have a 10:1 LOC advantage over Java/C/C++, then with an equal number of applications being developed, I'd assume that there would be 10x as many Java/C/C++ jobs available as Python/Ruby jobs.
I'm wondering why there aren't more IronPython/IronRuby/F#/Powershell focused startups in the Microsoft world. It would seem like a competitive advantage.
For web application development, I'd expect PHP/RoR to have a bigger footprint.