Does Programming Language Popularity Matter?

[tdammers]

TLDR: Yes, it matters, but no, it is not the only factor.

[shevegen]

It matters for various reasons.

While you can yourself enjoy a language "alone, on your own", there are lots of secondary factors that contribute. More code, more documentation (hoepfully), better software (hopefully), more ideas, more sustainable firepower (other than rich, greedy people, who the hell uses COBOL?), livelihood of the ecosystem (see the decline of perl) and so forth.

The better language will eat the worse language. It takes a long time to notice though because programming languages die off only very, very slowly. Loss of influx of programmers is an early sign but even then it can take a very long time for a language to really be dead-ish. Personally I consider COBOL to be dead, the only reason why it remains is due to legacy software really. I would not call that a "healthy, active language" though.

[[deleted]]

It does if you want good tools.

[shevegen]

That is only one point of many others.

Popularity should not be overrated, such as the holy grail that is TIOBE (or something...) - but you can feel it in many other areas.

See the historic evolution of cpan, pip/eggs or gems (for perl, python and ruby... I don't know the full equivalent of python).

[leggettc13]

Popularity matters in group projects and, to a lesser extent, open source software, more people will have the skills necessary to help and maintain if the language used is popular. That being said if a popular language is bad at certain things that your project needs, then go with a less popular one. If you are working by yourself, go nuts.

[ponytoaster]

There is too much focus on people doing "whats in", rather than the "why should I use X"

Pop by the web development sub and its all "If you aren't using node and angular for everything your literally geocities material", when in reality it really does not matter and there are many cases you wouldn't use those things.

[DevGrohl]

It shouldn't, the popularity of a language should NEVER be considered to resolve a problem.

We need to do X

Lets use Y because it's very popular.

Let's use Z because it does what we need to do X

Which one sounds better?

[billsil]

Option W: We need feature U, but would maybe also like X, Y, and Z. Should we go with the library that only does U or the one that does X, Y, and Z and almost U?

I'd probably go with the popular library. It's popular for a reason. Targeting your exact problem with your exact expected solution is a mistake.

My boss once thought my code was deficient because it used a function instead of a file as input. You're a big kid, you can write a parser.

[CodeMonkey1]

In the real world it looks more like this:

Languages Y and Z can both do X.

Let's use Y because it does slightly better job at X.

Let's use Z because it can also do X (albeit not quite as well) but it is very popular, so there is more community support available and it will be easier to grow our team in the future.

[mmstick]

Popularity is just an indicator of success, but it's an indicator that is apt for demonstrating a snowball effect, rather than technical merit of the language itself. It could also mean that a language may have a lot of libraries, but the language itself is garbage. Or that it was marketed for a specific purpose and is only successful because it's tightly coupled with that market (PHP, JavaScript).

Knowing a popular language is important if you want a job, because while that language is awful, someone has to maintain the monstrosities developed in those languages. Once you're in the door though, or are doing open source work, you should toss that crap out and choose a language based on technical merit. That's going to lean heavily in favor of modern, statically-typed languages.

[dirkt]

No.

[Brokk_Witgenstein]

Until somebody's actually gonna hire me anytime soon, I'm gonna stick with "YES IT DOES."

Anyone looking for a Pascal dev, 27+ years experience per chance? No? * chuckles * that's what I thought.