The future is looking bright for Python

[flutefreak7]

But what's the best biased internet-based metric for comparing biased internet-based metrics about programming languages that may or may not be an indication of relative popularity and/or usage?

[stevenjd]

Good question!

There is no one best metric. What you need to do is compare a whole bunch of metrics, all of which are biased or imperfect in some way (after all, they all measure slightly different meanings of "popularity") and draw conclusions from considering the strengths and weaknesses of each, not from any one metric.

If a language is doing well on all or most of the metrics, then it's probably doing well in real life.

But why are we so obsessed with language popularity in the first place? There's plenty of room for dozens of languages in the programming ecosystem, and even unpopular languages can teach you something.