var_explained

author here, let me know if you have any questions!

The first few graphs use the interactive [Stack Overflow Trends](http://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends) tool, which is all public data. This is useful since it lets readers modify the graphs (for example, to add a few more tags to the comparison).

The later graphs use data that's already not public (what tags users visit together, and what countries tags are visited from), so there's no reason not to use visits instead.

The graphs for visits over time do look very similar (in general question traffic by tag roughly matches questions asked, but as a slightly lagging indicator)

OP author here: the rivalries there are directional, "if you liked X, you probably disliked Y", but not vice versa. (One thing I find interesting is that most rivalries really are directional: you see git users disliking svn, but not svn users disliking git).

Perhaps there's a way I could make that clearer in the post!

OP author here; in another blog post I explored the growth in questions about some cross-platform solutions. Ionic (now Ionic2) has been growing quickly, and React Native is among the fastest growing tags on the site. So you may get your wish!

https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/05/16/exploring-state-mobile...

That was an early hypothesis I considered, but it doesn't fit the data. That would show up as a larger tabs/spaces salary gap for big companies, when in fact the gap is similar across all company sizes:

https://twitter.com/drob/status/875493967865008129

Perhaps it could play a role as a more indirect effect: people leaving Google/Microsoft/Apple/etc, starting new companies or joining senior positions at others, and spreading this particular practice.

This is not the reason for the correlation. The p-value of the tabs/spaces connection is about 10^-13 (one in 10 trillion), and it can be found separately within each (large) country.

This does not mean the effect isn't confounded with some other factor, but it does mean it's not a multiple hypothesis testing issue.

You can explore the code and regression yourself! Take a look: https://github.com/dgrtwo/tabs-spaces-post

I've got a followup coming about what words lead to upvotes, and rust features quite prominently there!

The latter is indeed what that graph is showing: what percentage of each language's users get stuck in Vim (or more precisely what % of their Vim visits are to that question). It's not being confused with the most used programming languages.