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What programming languages are used most on weekends?

stackoverflow.blog

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Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#191

Post by jodrellblank »

mikekchar wrote: post #83
segmondy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

I think that's fair enough, but I'm not sure I equate one to the other. Your examples are complaining about a lack of exposure to different kinds of tools that already exist rather than lack of depth in tools that the developers use. Although grossly unfair, it's sometimes instructive to split people in two categories in order to consider a point. With that in mind, I notice that there are programmers who want to lea…

Really, you use Prolog (in the shell)? What for - have you blogged about it anywhere?

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#192

Post by hyperpallium »

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…

I would have expected HW to be only a small proportion, but I'd also expect think terms like "pointers, algorithm, recursion" to be much more common for HW.

If Hw, would correlate annually with semesters (noting that SO is internationally popular, and different countries have different schedules).

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#193

Post by sulam »

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.

The predictable comment that learning Java is not necessarily an education is being repeatedly responded to here. I clearly should have included a response to this sort of argument in the original. Since I didn't, and since I can't edit now, I'll do it here.

1) Does learning Java keep you from learning CS concepts like pure functions and category theory? Obviously not. It may not be completely natural, but people do unnatural things in the name of an education all the time.

2) When you hire an intern these days, it's pretty expensive. The internship ends up being a trial employee, especially if they're a rising senior. The employer wants to get as much valuable information about the intern as they can. They may contribute actual production code, but probably not if it's Haskell. More importantly, you learn more about their ability to work with your environment (and they learn whether or not they want to work there) the closer you get to the internship being as close as possible to being a newgrad employee. Haskell is cool, but it will probably get in the way of many of the valuable things an internship can provide both parties. And I want to reiterate that these aren't cheap. You often end up paying the intern new grad wages normalized for the length of their internship, and it's not atypical to pay for housing on top of that, plus various events, time taken from to bring them up to speed on a team, etc.

3) MIT is teaching Python in its intro course. If having Haskell or any other academically "interesting" language is so important then they are doing a great disservice to their CS students. What are the chances this is true? I think it's much more likely that the MIT intro course language is either an uninteresting choice or very specifically chosen to be of interest to non-academics. Now, I don't think MIT is necessarily the be-all end-all in CS education, but is anyone prepared to argue they are worse than UPenn, which uses OCaml in a similar course? (I'm a fan of OCaml too, fwiw!)

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#194

Post by solidr53 »

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…

You're right, github data would be much more accurate for weekend projects.

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#195

Post by tumbling_stone »

kriro wrote: post #181

I'd be more interested in Github commits on weekends vs. weekdays as that is likely to be a better indicator of side projects (due to the "homework factor"). Or maybe Gitlab commits or private Github commits since public Github commits are FLOSS and thus likely to include more side project commits than another data sets.

Interesting idea. I'll give it a go this weekend.

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#196

Post by kc10 »

This doesn't necessarily mean the most used languages. Probably these are the languages that developers are trying to learn and post the questions. And other languages such as C#, Java have reached certain state that people may not have lot of questions, so certainly the activity would decrease and doesn't mean lot of people don't use these languages.

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#198

Post by quadcore »

Oh that's a wonderful idea. Someone should - continue to - study the differences between weekday and weekend hacking. Programming languages, but also methods, productivity, value for customers, etc.

The way I would like the world is that the weekend hacking has way better methods, languages, productivity and value for customers.

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#199

Post by frozenport »

KirinDave wrote: post #177
morgante wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ASM (not necessarily x86), C and C++ are very well represented in side projects and hobbies because of the DIY device community, though.

The argument is that you would see a more specific tag like MIPS.

Re: What programming languages are used most on weekends?

#200

Post by lngnmn »

Python? If noyt it should, because there is no better prototyping/bootstrapping language and definitely there is no better culture than that which emerged around this language.

Only Scheme of old days could be compared to have similar similar balance of features and culture of careful attention to details, which, basically, defines a craft approaching (turned into) an art.

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