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What programming languages are used most on weekends?

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Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#161

Post by wyager »

sulam wrote: post #137
wyager wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was around when Dijkstra died that UT switched away from Haskell to Java. And yes, from what I've heard from several faculty members around in that period, a lot of it was from external pressure from large regional employers (some of which you have mentioned).

Honestly, would you rather hire an intern that has to learn Java from scratch, or one that actually had a class in it? I'm a fan of Haskell, but I think it being the intro CS class language is an educational fail.

On a philosophical note, the goal of CS education is not to score Java internships.

On a practical note, learning a language like Java is not the hard part if you were taught properly. With a solid theory foundation (for which Haskell knowledge covers a great span of content), learning any production language to a practically useful degree should take a couple weeks at most.

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#162

Post by flukus »

inimino wrote: post #146
sulam wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, would you rather hire an intern that has to learn Java from scratch, or one that actually had a class in it? I'm a fan of Haskell, but I think it being the intro CS class language is an educational fail.

Universities are not supposed to be trade schools though, right?

Around here they always advertise themselves with slogans like "an education for the real world". I think they became trade schools but still haven't realized it.

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#163

Post by thinkpad20 »

sulam wrote: post #137
wyager wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was around when Dijkstra died that UT switched away from Haskell to Java. And yes, from what I've heard from several faculty members around in that period, a lot of it was from external pressure from large regional employers (some of which you have mentioned).

Honestly, would you rather hire an intern that has to learn Java from scratch, or one that actually had a class in it? I'm a fan of Haskell, but I think it being the intro CS class language is an educational fail.

Learning Haskell can teach students a lot of very important concepts that can shape their view of programming and problem solving for the better. It's not impossible to learn these things with other languages, and of course there are many things you might not learn using Haskell, but that's why you typically learn several programming languages in the course of a university education. In any case, it's not that hard to learn Java, and I would certainly look more closely at a resume that listed Haskell proficiency. Almost every resume I see lists Java.

Also I second another poster's point that universities are not trade schools. I think it's a little sad if a department stopped teaching Haskell because of industry pressure, because the goal of a CS program is to teach CS, not to teach whatever programming language is on top of TIOBE.

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#164

Post by seanmcdirmid »

darkkindness wrote: post #98
eptcyka wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whilst it's true that one can program in a functional style in almost any language, I fail to see how javascript would help someone learn about functional programming.

It's true that you can program in a functional style in almost any language, but it's just simpler for Javascript. Functions are first-class objects in Javascript, and arrays have built-in forEach, map, reduce, and filter -- all useful for a beginner in functional programming. C++ and Java have lambdas and foreach, but they aren't as simple to use.

C# on the other hand, support FP pretty well, as long as static typing without HM is acceptable.

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#165

Post by thomasfoster96 »

cpeterso wrote: post #153
thomasfoster96 wrote: post #134

> We defined weekends using UTC dates... ...which means quite a few Saturday mornings in Asia have been counted as weekdays and many late Friday nights in the Americas have been counted as weekends. It would be great if StackOverflow had information on the local timezone that the question was asked in. Seeing Mon-Fri 9-5 vs other times would be interesting.

If Stack Overflow doesn't retain the local time zone for posts, they could just use the subset of UTC weekend hours that don't overlap business hours in any time zone.

But the subset of UTC weekend hours that don’t overlap would be pretty small, though?

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#166

Post by platz »

smaddox wrote: post #139
platz wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really a 'sample', if they are reporting on the entirety of their data for a given period? Is the question interpreted as extending to those not on stackoverflow, or is it a complete census of the 'population' of their data?

I would argue it's a sort of (nonrandom) proxy sample in the sense that they're sampling a fraction of the people actually programming on the weekend.

Ok, so if we make sure we're only talking about:

    > "what languages tend to be **asked about** on weekends, as opposed to weekdays?"
and:

    > "explore differences between **questions that are posted** on weekdays and weekends."
as opposed to the article title:

    > "What Programming Languages Are **Used Most** on Weekends?"
(emphasis added), is the problem then resolved?

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#167

Post by morgante »

slg wrote: post #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 c…

Yup, seeing the top 10 list made me immediately think of homework assignments.

In the real world, programmers don't take their questions with "recursion" or "pointers" very often. Nor is Assembly a common language for side projects.

This definitely seems like a case of students simply being relatively overrepresented on weekends.

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#168

Post by morgante »

rifung wrote: post #144
kybishop wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Students are much more likely to ask lots of questions. Far more difficult projects are often due on a Monday or Tuesday to give students the weekend to finish up, the exact kind of projects likely to elicit questions at the last minute.

Do you have any data to back that up? At least when I was a student, I would be pretty unlikely to ask on Stack Overflow because I'd probably need answers quickly and not want to wait for a response, but I don't expect everyone to be like me. I also don't even feel like my assignments were typically due on Monday or Tuesday. I remember often students would ask their teachers to make their assignments due Friday inste…

> At least when I was a student, I would be pretty unlikely to ask on Stack Overflow because I'd probably need answers quickly and not want to wait for a response, but I don't expect everyone to be like me.

Many classes have assignments over a week or two. It absolutely makes sense to ask SO for questions.

If anything, there was less urgency to my homework questions than there is to my current professional ones.

> I also don't even feel like my assignments were typically due on Monday or Tuesday.

While I had my fair share of assignments on Monday, that doesn't need to be true to explain this. Even if you assume that students work equally throughout the week on homework, they'd represent a larger percentage of developers during the weekend (when professionals are much less likely to be working).

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#169

Post by softawre »

rifung wrote: post #144
kybishop wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Students are much more likely to ask lots of questions. Far more difficult projects are often due on a Monday or Tuesday to give students the weekend to finish up, the exact kind of projects likely to elicit questions at the last minute.

Do you have any data to back that up? At least when I was a student, I would be pretty unlikely to ask on Stack Overflow because I'd probably need answers quickly and not want to wait for a response, but I don't expect everyone to be like me. I also don't even feel like my assignments were typically due on Monday or Tuesday. I remember often students would ask their teachers to make their assignments due Friday inste…

Stack Overflow questions get answered very quickly. At least the answerable ones do.

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#170

Post by softawre »

rifung wrote: post #144
kybishop wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Students are much more likely to ask lots of questions. Far more difficult projects are often due on a Monday or Tuesday to give students the weekend to finish up, the exact kind of projects likely to elicit questions at the last minute.

Do you have any data to back that up? At least when I was a student, I would be pretty unlikely to ask on Stack Overflow because I'd probably need answers quickly and not want to wait for a response, but I don't expect everyone to be like me. I also don't even feel like my assignments were typically due on Monday or Tuesday. I remember often students would ask their teachers to make their assignments due Friday inste…

Stack Overflow questions get answered very quickly. At least the answerable ones do.
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