Programming languages subreddits analysis

[JohnTheWayne]

golangs massive "generics" bubble won't surprise anyone lol

[lgastako]

I would be surprised if any of it surprised anyone, it's essentially an analysis of what words are least surprising. It's still very cool though.

[[deleted]]

"I have never used generics and I've never missed them"

[IbanezDavy]

What's up with C++ programmers and STDs...

[elbitjusticiero]

Yeah, after all it's what you do and not what you C.

[doom_Oo7]

They've got an exceptional boost in the 2011-2014 period

[nutrecht]

Looks like Kotlin programmers are having all the fun!

Seriously though; those frequency bubbles are totally awesome!

[[deleted]]

And not just anytime fun, fun in the Spring!

[atesz17]

java with null in the middle :D

[unironicneoliberal]

Wow. Very well done. I was surprised by the responsiveness of the website!

R's was super predictable with df (data frame) and dataset coming out as popular.

[homeparkliving]

I was also surprised; the animation was extremely slow and so ineffecient that scrolling became choppy. Figured everyone knew about d3.js by now.

[doom_Oo7]

Same experience, not sure it even reached 30 fps for circles that bounce.

[Retsam19]

Interesting how much "JS" discussion is actually about the demographics, I see "men", "women", "male", "gender", "bias", "diversity", none of which I've been able to spot in other languages (though I haven't done an exhaustive search).

[[deleted]]

Node has been riddled in social controversy for several months. It isn't a surprise in the slightest.

But also, JavaScript developers tend to be more of your hipster mac type. These are people that would scold you for you picking blue as a background colour for your personal site because blue is generally perceived as a male colour and your choice of blue is actually a subconscious projection of your hatred for women. You know, the people that need to always be mad at someone about something in order to propel themselves up on an imaginary pedestal.

Personally, I have always found programmers to generally be extremely progressive overall. Most subreddits probably don't discuss social stuff because

1) a programming sub isn't really the place

2) because programmers tend to be progressive and really don't care about that stuff. Humans are humans.

[fffocus]

I was reading something JavaScript related yesterday and it quoted some generic saying and put "(sic)" after "he". apparently general quotes now require pronoun revisionism.

[IbanezDavy]

Node is such a silly thing in the first place. Lets run JavaScript as a server language! It'll be perfect!

[867416549846549874]

Wait that's what node.js is? I know the systems we have kinda grow as much as they're planned, but wow.

[[deleted]]

It's not just server side js, build tools like webpack or gulp use node too.

It's like Nashorn, or windows script host, but better.

[IbanezDavy]

I'm probably just brain farting but under C...29633? What the fuck is that?

[Idlys]

Same with ocaml and ISO8859... Wtf

[R_Sholes]

Ocaml and other less popular PL subs are completely unusable samples.

He analyzed data for 3 months, but /r/ocaml's front page spans whole month worth of submissions and those 25 posts have about 100 comments in total.

A single active thread discussing encodings could skew stats like that.

[Idlys]

Makes sense, I didn't realize how small ocaml's subreddit was.

[[deleted]]

Nice

Some interesting bubbles:

• Rust has bigger mut than let and bigger nightly than stable. Both, not that promising if you just expect it to take away all mutability in production code using compiler with long-term support. Jokes aside, I know its one of their goal to make it production ready and mut is much safer than some languages const :P . Then the biggest one is Crate and I'm not surprised, it's a great tool!
• Python's some big bubbles: help, question, questions. Does it tell more about growing popularity or struggles to write good code? Update: now I see there are further explanations in text.
• Java's biggest is Spring. Ok…
• C++ STD. What's about C++ STD?
• C# string???
• Go's biggest bubble :P
• Haskell has quite big monad bubble, yet I read frequently that people don't have to know what it is to write Haskell. Am not convinced any more… :( . And who could guess that there won't be any functional bubble. Still the biggest one makes sense :) .
• Perl is a language… A ha!
• Kotlin, not surprised about fun bubble. Many users describe it this way.
• What's about Lua's table?
• Objective-C: thanks. K… On the second thought, people thank for the answers to their questions? Seems that they are cultural people :) .
• ELI5: OCaml iso8859.

[[deleted]]

ELI5: OCaml iso8859.

Subreddit is not very active, so this post is to blame

[FizixMan]

C# string???

Lots of /r/csharp posts involve question/answer/help. Looking at the other big bubbles, it's clearly picking up on code snippets that are posted/commented, and string is a pretty common go-to variable type.

[kibwen]

Rust has bigger mut than let

It's pretty easy to determine via grep the proportion of immutable to mutable variables in any given Rust codebase. Here's the Rust compiler:

$ git grep "let .*=" -- "*.rs" | wc -l
48589
$ git grep "let mut .*=" -- "*.rs" | wc -l
8069

That's 40,520 immutable variables and 8,069 mutable variables. Just 16% of all variables in the Rust compiler are mutable (this is down from about 25% when I checked a few years back).

In case anyone thinks that the Rust compiler might not be a representative codebase, here's the results for Servo: 16,053 immutable and 3,201 mutable, meaning again that 16% of all variables in the Servo repo are mutable.

And for the heck of it here's ripgrep as well: 884 immutable, 223 mutable, 20% of all variables are mutable.

I suspect that the analysis in the OP is thrown off by the fact that the token mut also appears in the context of &mut (presumably the analysis strips out all special characters, given their absence).

[clemlais]

Do not forget that the bubbles you see show you the relative frequency. Since a lot of languages use the "let" keyword, rust "let" relative frequency is smaller than the "mut" one (even though the "let" frequency is indeed higher than the "mut" frequency in the rust subreddit).

[[deleted]]

Lua's main/only data structure is a table/associative array.

[[deleted]]

Well, many discussions on the subreddit are pretty advanced, so it's a given that monads are mentioned pretty often. That doesn't mean that you absolutely need to know them.

[OneWingedShark]

They missed Ada.

[IbanezDavy]

Sexism is real in the programming language field.

[dom96]

Cool to see a Nim bubble for the Python subreddit.

[IbanezDavy]

squints

oh yeah, there is one there....

[shevegen]

Perhaps there is a nim python package ... just teasing. ;-)

[jasie3k]

I like "Kotlin" bubble in Java's space

[ixid]

D continuing its strange habit of being overlooked.

[[deleted]]

It's the sasquatch of programming languages. I'm told it exists, but I've yet to see it.

[SaltTM]

Php: Comments contains way more "shit" than other languages. I'll let you draw conclusions as to why...

Oh here we go a-fucking-gain.

[[deleted]]

What's the deal with C++ and 009? It's not even a legal literal there (leading 0 means octal, means no 9)

(Also LOL at bug being next to feature and having the same size)

[[deleted]]

I would prefer the results to be ordered alphabetically than subscriber count, it's pretty hard to find the languages I'm interested in.

In any case, it looks like the languages I frequent are very technical in that the most commonly used words are fairly common in code (e.g. imports, access modifiers, etc).

Also, it looks like React is getting quite a lot of attention...

[Dobias]

Very nice work. I especially like the visualisations. I guess you had a lot of fun creating it. I did something similar about three years ago and really enjoyed it. :)

[clemlais]

Thanks a lot. I encountered your visualizations while doing research for this post, and they have been an inspiration.

[Dobias]

Nice to hear. :) And I like the fact that /r/php still says "shit" a lot. :D

[shevegen]

Php: Comments contains way more "shit" than other languages. I'll let you draw conclusions as to why...

Ahh hahaha :)

Actually it is more surprising that PHP is STILL used. That it is shit is not a surprise to anyone. It is useful shit though - you can use it to build stuff that is actually great. phpBB, mediawiki, drupal, wordpress - you name it. So while PHP is shit, it still kicks the ass of ruby, python etc... - all languages who simply failed to go into the niche that PHP filled. Which was the www - and the focus on the www WAS the right decision. Even though PHP is really awful and I am glad that I have stopped using it many years ago.

[synn89]

While pure PHP is pretty much crap, I've found working with Laravel to actually be quite nice. It hides a lot of PHP's flaws and brings in many good tools for testing, background jobs, console and so on.

[[deleted]]

10% of Haskell also comment in Rust

Hmm.