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What programming languages are used most on weekends?

stackoverflow.blog

31–40 of 299 posts

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#32

One way I use Stackoverflow’s dev stats is to make educated guesses about the easiness of finding developers in 2-3 years time to maintain now-greenfield projects. Does Ruby seem to go down while Python is in steady growth? Let's move away from Rails. Swift is picking up steam? It's safe to switch from Objective-C. This dataset seems to be just fantastic for that.

In my opinion, that's what's wrong with the world. Chasing tech, pick something solid and stick with it. I have seen developers barely get decent in one language only to drop it and learn a new language. Picking up the basics of a language is easy, but it's knowing the nuisance that separates the professional from the amateur.

[deleted]

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#33

One way I use Stackoverflow’s dev stats is to make educated guesses about the easiness of finding developers in 2-3 years time to maintain now-greenfield projects. Does Ruby seem to go down while Python is in steady growth? Let's move away from Rails. Swift is picking up steam? It's safe to switch from Objective-C. This dataset seems to be just fantastic for that.

In my opinion, that's what's wrong with the world. Chasing tech, pick something solid and stick with it. I have seen developers barely get decent in one language only to drop it and learn a new language. Picking up the basics of a language is easy, but it's knowing the nuisance that separates the professional from the amateur.

s/nuisance/nuance

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#35
post #10

I don't think the number of questions asked correlate with which languages are used the most. My weekends are mainly Java, but I don't need to post on stack overflow because all of my questions have been already addressed.

Yeah, this is basically what I came to say. Haskell's search volume could be because it's more difficult to use than other languages, or is more poorly documented. It would certainly explain Sharepoint being so high during the work week, having struggled with Sharepoint Configuration Mountain before.

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, that's what's wrong with the world. Chasing tech, pick something solid and stick with it. I have seen developers barely get decent in one language only to drop it and learn a new language. Picking up the basics of a language is easy, but it's knowing the nuisance that separates the professional from the amateur.

"Picking up the basics of a language is easy, but it's knowing the nuisance that separates the professional from the amateur." From learning perspective correct. I don't think developers chase new languages, I think it's more, play 'catch up to latest language' to be more employable. You would hope companies, CTOs, lead techs choose languages to solve the unique business problems. Language choice looks more, to me, l…

I can't tell, I know many developers today who are on the new shiny js thing, golang, elixir, scalar, rust train, but they never got really good in their first language be it Java, python, or php.

They use linux or OSX. But they don't know awk/sed/bash, give em a very simple problem, they would write 1000 line of OOP, united test code when a few line of scripts would solve it.

I know many programmers, who graduated with a CS degree, they go out of their way to implement ridiculous rule engines and overly complicated systems, when they can just use prolog and glue their app to prolog.

I've witnessed many so called fullstack developers who break out in cold sweat at the sight or thought of writing SQL. They want an ORM.

This is what I call chasing, new things, when the old things are rock solid. I see this today, where people cry about PHP, but yet don't even use it's good features. Go use NoSQL solutions but never even had a clue about their SQL DB.

/rant

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#38
post #35
post #10

I don't think the number of questions asked correlate with which languages are used the most. My weekends are mainly Java, but I don't need to post on stack overflow because all of my questions have been already addressed.

Yeah, this is basically what I came to say. Haskell's search volume could be because it's more difficult to use than other languages, or is more poorly documented. It would certainly explain Sharepoint being so high during the work week, having struggled with Sharepoint Configuration Mountain before.

That doesn't explain a relative search increase on the weekend. The stats shown are not cross-language comparisons.

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#39
post #10

I don't think the number of questions asked correlate with which languages are used the most. My weekends are mainly Java, but I don't need to post on stack overflow because all of my questions have been already addressed.

I don't see how this would matter. The datapoint is tag frequency on weekends for a given language compared to tag frequency on weekdays for the same language. It isn't using absolute numbers nor is it comparing cross-language.

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#40
I surprised there was no mention in the blog post or the comments so far about the homework factor. It isn't just personal side projects that people are working on over the weekend. I am betting the relative percentage of CS students on the site is also much higher on the weekend. Tags like assembly, pointers, algorithm, recursion, class, and math are all rather vague. Those topics are all discussed at length in CS classes, but if you are working on a real world project in those fields, odds are you will tag it with a more specific technology you are using rather than the abstract theory behind it.

EDIT: On second look, Python, C, and C++ are also the go to languages for CS classes (along with Java but that is also a big enterprise language unlike the other three.) Almost this whole list seems to be schoolwork related.

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