Re:Viability of Unpopular Programming Languages (2018)
by ACow_Adonis on Wednesday April 01, 2020 @07:02PM
(#22754433)
I agree about specifying what's meant by "popularity".
Thing is I'm actually interested in the complete opposite of what you say you're interested in.
Couldn't care less about paid programmer time and the job market.
What do people use when they aren't getting paid by someone else to program? What do they write about? What would they like/want to use? Who's got the greatest grass-roots/continuing community not focused around apps, corporations and business sponsorship?
Re:Viability of Unpopular Programming Languages (2018)
by hnick on Wednesday April 01, 2020 @09:12PM
(#22755285)
There are also many languages that I would consider "supplementary", and Perl would be a good example. There are a few jobs where it's the main language but most listings I see have it as a nice-to-have or side skill language for things like a Devops hire that wants some kind of scripting but doesn't really care what (listed as an option alongside Python, Ruby, etc).
So in particular I'd say Perl is pervasive, but not a hiring differential. At least that's my experience looking at jobs.
Basically they only look at number of search engine hits for "<language> programming". That's surprisingly meager. I think a better index of programming language popularity would use more signals: job listings, open source activity, stackoverflow questions, surveys of programmers and companies, etc.
Also it would be good to specify what's meant by "popularity". I'd be mostly interested in each language's share of paid programmer time, so the signals above should be weighted to get the best approximation to that truth.