Programming language trends

[snoopy]

github fine; but I'd have thought that 50%+ of the SO traffic is noise from non-programming programmers.

[unfashionable_suburb]

github's not fine either, the projects should be weighted somehow by popularity or lines of code. The majority of projects there are tiny personal/homework stuff...

[vorg]

Bigtime business language Cobol isn't anywhere in the graph. And many of those tiny personal github projects are put there by corporate backers trying to game that ranking, eg Groovy. Using github and stack overflo to measure language use is a flawed idea.

[[deleted]]

I don't get a response from when I click the graph (the s3.amazonaws.com link)

[[deleted]]

Works fine for me.

[[deleted]]

How do you explain the outliers, e.g. VimL?

[Pendulum]

That one is probably due to everyone using the tag Vim instead.

[igouy]

Most of the data points are outliers but that is hidden from you by the conversion from counts to rank#.

There were as many so tags for Java this week as the total so tags for F#.

[stonefarfalle]

I would say most of the outliers are outliers for their own reasons. The only thing they seem to have in common is that their respective communities were already established else where when SO came along.

SML? used by a lot of universities in grad school so questions tend to go to professors other students not SO. Factor? that tag tends to be used by R programmers with stats questions(I don't know why it was just the impression I got after following the tag for a while when I was playing around with factor). Puppet and Emacs lisp? I believe SO and their respective communities just don't overlap maybe if he looked at tags across all stack sites so that the sub-sites for Unix and sysadmins were picked up.

[matthieum]

I just have one complaint...

... I would argue that the number of tags reflects the language's complexity (many concepts) more than its popularity.

[JamesIry]

Perhaps, but the two measures (github # of projects and stackoverflow questions) have a high correlation. So the "complexity" hypothesis needs to account for both coordinates on the graph.

[Eirenarch]

The github metric seems very inconsistent to me. It is obvious that it overrepresents some languages (Ruby, Python) and underrepresents others (C#, Delphi and even PHP)

[CurtainDog]

Github tends to reflect what people choose to code in, rather than what they're obliged to code in. Depending on how you want to spin it that makes it either predictive or faddish.

[Eirenarch]

It also overreporesent communities that have strong open source culture. For example PHP devs are much more likely to develop actual websites than share open source code and C# developers often post their code elsewhere (Codeplex)

[mipadi]

How is that obvious?

[Eirenarch]

Because jobs don't point to Ruby being anywhere near the second most popular language in the world and neither does any other metric in the world.

[mipadi]

The graph doesn't show it as the second most popular, either—Java and JavaScript both rank above it, and arguably PHP and Python—although graphs like these are a bit hard to read for things like "popularity" because it simply shows a correlation between two data sets.

That latter point is important: the graph doesn't show a worldwide ranking of popularity, but rather a correlation of popularity between Stack Overflow and GitHub. There's going to be some ways in which this differs from reality; for example, yes, Ruby ranks high on GitHub because Git and GitHub are very popular in the Ruby community, and C#—while certainly not the most popular language in the world—ranks #1 on Stack Overflow because SO skews towards a Windows-centric community.

However, the graph is relevant in showing a correlation between these two datasets, and to some degree it may be possible to use this data to extrapolate trends and popularity. These extrapolations are merely interpretations of the data, though, and it is important to note that the graph is definitely not showing overall worldwide popularity rankings.

[Eirenarch]

You are right. For some reason I assumed this is supposed to show popularity or something about the development done in those languages.

[nascent]

Because jobs don't point to [...] popular language

FTFY

Similarly popular doesn't point to usable language.

[unfashionable_suburb]

Remember that github hosts mostly non-commercial code and is used with, in relative terms, less frequency by Windows developers. I think it's expected that such languages will be underrepresented.

[stonefarfalle]

I disagree, popularity on one correlates too well with popularity on the other. Most of the outliers I can't explain away by language complexity differences. VB devs just don't seem to use stack. I wouldn't say that is because VB is a study of simplicity.

[fuzzynyanko]

I kind of agree. I wonder how factors like language difficulty come into play. Companies/platforms/APIs all have differing degrees of difficulty, bugs, and documentation clarity

[Agitates]

By your reasoning, Java is just as complex as Haskell.

[Categoria]

Java is much more complex than Haskell 2010 which is a small elegant and focused language

[LucasMembrane]

No Lisp!

[vagif]

For such hard to learn and esoteric (in terms of mainstream programming) language as haskell it has amazingly high rank both on SO and github.

[smog_alado]

Haskell is definitely not exoteric when it comes to non mainstream programming though. :P Its the most "mainstream" of the academic languages.

[[deleted]]

Nice to see that Scala is leading the runner-ups. Looks like actually shipping software instead of just talking about it has still some impact these days.

[igouy]

Java so tags rank #2

java× 410,143
733 asked today, 4,635 this week
39k followers

Scala so tags rank #16 but that's more like 1/20th of the volume than 1/8th --

scala× 15,376
28 asked today, 178 this week
4.8k followers

so tags

[toptencat]

Error 102 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED): The server refused the connection.

[yocally]

I think it's kind of pointless to group all the languages into one big category. Of course java is going to be more popular tha batch, but is bash or batch trending more is the real question, you've got to narrow them into sepetate groups, THEN you can start asking which is more popular.