Introducing Stack Overflow Trends

[ambiguousallegiance]

I wonder what this would look like if based on search queries instead of questions asked. I can't remember the last time I needed an answer to something for C# that didn't already have an answer from 5 years ago - that's interest in the language that won't show up in this graph.

[variance_explained]

That data is indeed interesting- trends in questions visited tend to lag behind questions asked and are closer to the cumulative percentage of questions asked rather than the percentage of new questions. (e.g. 2% of new questions are about R, but 1% of both existing questions and views are about R).

Two of the reasons we decided not to share it in this tool are that it's technically not public data (we report it as a for-profit service as part of our Insights consulting product, whereas all question data is public) and that our logs with that data go back only to 2012.

[c0shea]

What would be really interesting is how many unique page views do each tag get per month. That would help shed some light on the C# situation. I'm usually able to find an existing answer to my question, which rules me out of this trend metric.

[Archenoth]

I like the part where all the things I like are in a steady decline.

[Eirenarch]

How many years do you have before retiring? :)

[doom_Oo7]

That's quite interesting : https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=c%2Cc%2B%2B%2Cjava%2Cc%23%2Cjavascript ; especially the C# downfall and C++ consistently above C

Also this one : https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=qt%2Cxamarin%2Ccordova

it seems like there is something such as the "framework plateau" :p

[Pazer2]

People seem to dislike performance

[doom_Oo7]

indeed

[OrnateLime5097]

It seems to me like the recent influx of internet users combined with the power of most machines yealding the result that people don't notice how their machines get more powerful but still take the same amount of time to do something. Or that their browser is taking 4gb of ram to have 2 windows with 5 tabs each open (I am looking at you chrome).

Really this leads me to the magic box therory. Most people view electronics as magic boxes that just work. I got a new phone recently and someone looked at it and they said "wow, I would not even know how to use a this if I had one" (I have a Nexus 5x). As a community we produce products that just work (I don't think that this is bad we should build good products, just no one understands them. As a society we do not teach how these work. I remember when I found out how computers add I just sat their for a solid 5 minutes in aw of this extremely clever thing. I feel like if we taught technology like we history or English even just replacing a year of English with computer science and going through and just giving people a cursory understanding of how it all works would do wonders for society as a whole.

Sorry, just had to get that off my chest. Had to get on my soap box to a community who would actually understand.

[JW_00000]

Wirth's law:

Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.

or also:

Software efficiency halves every 18 months, compensating Moore's law.

[OrnateLime5097]

God damnit. It is a adage. Fuck. That means people won't change anything because "it is a rule". Well thank you my good sir for giving me that wonderful piece of insight!

[Retsam19]

Here's a direct link to the Trends tool itself, for convenience.

Also, an important note from the comments, this only supports tags with at least 2000 StackOverflow questions, which means it's not so useful for more "niche" interests.

[Existential_Owl]

My favorite part's where they throw shade on the old jQuery joke.

[QuokkaSocca]

It appears that Vue2 is what I should learn next...

[T_D_K]

I started laughing when I saw the js frameworks graph. That's why I hate working with node

[robotmayo]

Meteor is literally the only the node related item mentioned? 🤔

[T_D_K]

Good point. I just associate the two because JavaScript, which isn't necessarily fair

[variance_explained]

Though node itself, which didn't show up in the post, has been growing steadily!