What is going on with measures of programming language popularity?

Re:What is going on with measures of programming language po... by dzdt on Sunday September 30, 2018 @11:52PM (#18109924)

The article omits the Redmonk ranking [1], which is imho much better than TIOBE. The Redmonk approach uses github and stackexchange as complementary data sources, and shows a two dimensional main result.

The top 20 in the Redmonk ranking are

  1 JavaScript
  2 Java
  3 Python
  4 PHP
  5 C#
  6 C++
  7 CSS
  8 Ruby
  9 C
  9 Objective-C
  11 Swift
  12 Scala
  12 Shell
  14 Go
  14 R
  16 TypeScript
  17 PowerShell
  18 Perl
  19 Haskell
  20 Lua

Considering how different languages occupy different niches, the relative ranking withing niches seems reasonable. And ranking across niches scales according to size of the niche.

Client-side web scripting is a huge niche, hence javascript is in the top spot. General purpose desktop/server applications are another huge niche, served by Java, C#, C++, C, Scala, Go (in that order). And so on.

It seems pretty sane, and the results have been stable enough to interpret the rise of upcoming languages and see the resilience of top contenders.

[1] https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2018/08/10/language-rankings-6-1...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What is going on with measures of programming language po... by wink on Monday October 01, 2018 @03:34PM (#18116023)

Pretty sure I wrote this already at some point, but as a 9 year user who has not really starred anything in the last 8 years I still find this methodology flawed. Probably not as flawed as the other two, ok. Also there are some ecosystems where people don't just really use stackexchange, so those are also way off. Could be huge, could be nil.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What is going on with measures of programming language po... by weberc2 on Monday October 01, 2018 @03:39PM (#18116067)

Also, StackExchange doesn’t measure popularity, but popularity AND difficulty. All else equal, the harder language will have more SO activity.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What is going on with measures of programming language po... by esrauch on Monday October 01, 2018 @04:34PM (#18116600)

It is also skewed towards what slightly-beyond-beginners use; many true beginners haven't discovered it, many experienced people more easily find the same answers without posting.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What is going on with measures of programming language po... by fabian2k on Monday October 01, 2018 @04:33PM (#18116589)

I'm not convinced that SE activity measures difficulty. But it certainly is affected by much more than just popularity. I could imagine it measuring the total API surface, as you can ask more questions about larger subjects.

It's certainly a deeply flawed measure, but then pure search engine hits like TIOBE are likely much worse.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What is going on with measures of programming language po... by weberc2 on Monday October 01, 2018 @05:28PM (#18116982)

To be clear, I don't think it measures difficulty, but difficulty is necessarily a driver of the metric. A complex language is going to generate more questions than a small, intuitive language.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What is going on with measures of programming language po... by marcosdumay on Monday October 01, 2018 @09:47PM (#18118216)

Specifically, complexity will generate more questions than difficulty.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What is going on with measures of programming language po... by weberc2 on Tuesday October 02, 2018 @12:14AM (#18118745)

No, it can’t by definition. Complexity is a type of difficulty. :)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What is going on with measures of programming language po... by marcosdumay on Monday October 01, 2018 @09:46PM (#18118210)

It's very good of measuring documentation quality. As in, the better your documentation, the less activity there will be.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What is going on with measures of programming language po... by fhoffa on Monday October 01, 2018 @04:08PM (#18116347)

With Stack Overflow most people measure number of new questions - but that's a partial measure that can lead to wrong conclusions.

How to measure number of pageviews instead? I have a solution!

- https://towardsdatascience.com/these-are-the-real-stack-over...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What is going on with measures of programming language po... by faizshah on Monday October 01, 2018 @04:46PM (#18116674)

It would be interesting to see this combined with the github commits dataset on bigquery and compared to the redmonk ranking. The redmonk ranking is slightly different from the state of the octoverse ranking.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What is going on with measures of programming language po... by gaius on Tuesday October 02, 2018 @02:22AM (#18119221)

the Redmonk ranking [1], which is imho much better than TIOBE

What I think many fans of any sort of language popularity survey miss is that there are huge swathes of the industry that simply don’t actively participate in things like SO and GH. All of these results should be qualified as “amongst webdevs” (sorry “full stack engineers”).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What is going on with measures of programming language po... by hellofunk on Monday October 01, 2018 @02:53PM (#18115665)

What??! No Nim?!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What is going on with measures of programming language po... by jake-low on Monday October 01, 2018 @03:04PM (#18115752)

Nim is shown in the graph on the bottom left, at approximately X = 5, Y = 13.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What is going on with measures of programming language po... by hellofunk on Monday October 01, 2018 @07:31PM (#18117659)

Thanks, I was looking at the top 20 rankings in the post, not the site. I see it now.

[ Parent | on HN ]