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What programming languages are used late at night?

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Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#151

Post by [deleted] »

jcadam wrote: post #143
cstrahan wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd recommend just making yourself pick up a project, and run with it. Try not to over think it, and if you start to feel paralyzed, just say "fuck it, I'll do it the first, shittiest way that comes to mind." As an example, the first "real" project I wrote in Haskell was one or two weeks into learning it: a web testing framework/DSL (a la Capybara[0]) that spoke a (custom) protocol over socket to a headless webkit in…

> I'd recommend just making yourself pick up a project, and run with it. Try not to over think it, and if you start to feel paralyzed, just say "fuck it, I'll do it the first, shittiest way that comes to mind." I tried that. When I got stuck (fairly early on), I ended up switching my project from Haskell to Clojure :/

[deleted]

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#152

Post by [deleted] »

jcadam wrote: post #143
cstrahan wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd recommend just making yourself pick up a project, and run with it. Try not to over think it, and if you start to feel paralyzed, just say "fuck it, I'll do it the first, shittiest way that comes to mind." As an example, the first "real" project I wrote in Haskell was one or two weeks into learning it: a web testing framework/DSL (a la Capybara[0]) that spoke a (custom) protocol over socket to a headless webkit in…

> I'd recommend just making yourself pick up a project, and run with it. Try not to over think it, and if you start to feel paralyzed, just say "fuck it, I'll do it the first, shittiest way that comes to mind." I tried that. When I got stuck (fairly early on), I ended up switching my project from Haskell to Clojure :/

[deleted]

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#153

Post by bachmeier »

startupdiscuss wrote: post #11
falcolas wrote: post #2

Otherwise written as "what programming languages are being asked about late at night." To me, who rarely pulls up SO, correlating SO questions and page views with usage is a bit biased.

Whoah! The big news for me is that there is a programmer who rarely uses SO. I use it constantly. Can you say more about: 1. What your programming set up is. 2. What you do when there is an issue? I didn't know there was a reasonable alternative. I do the Google -> SO a lot. The only time Google brings up a different page is if the question is REALLY basic like how to use a function. Edit: added this postscript: I ha…

I write a lot of D code. SO isn't particularly helpful, because most activity takes place on the language's mailing list, which existed long before SO.

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#154

Post by openasocket »

rz2k wrote: post #113
matt4077 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Third chart on https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/01/19/women-in-the-2016-stac... , but it's not too interesting.

The differences are very small, and I am not too surprised with the relative popularity of Matlab and R compared to say Haskell, since there are relatively more women majoring in engineering that computer science, as well as relatively high numbers doing quantitative work in the social sciences. I wonder why Rust, though, is such a huge outlier. Maybe it is just noisy because there are so few people asking about Rust…

From the link, the women surveyed skewed towards being more junior/less experienced. And Rust is not exactly a language that skews towards junior developers, due to its high learning curve. I bet Rust would be less of an outlier if one controlled for level of experience.

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#155

Post by smitherfield »

johndubchak wrote: post #21
falcolas wrote: post #2

Otherwise written as "what programming languages are being asked about late at night." To me, who rarely pulls up SO, correlating SO questions and page views with usage is a bit biased.

There are some languages, like C++, where the first place to go seeking answers isn't SO. C++ devs tend to look at http://en.cppreference.com (using an English locale in this example). To me, it tends to bias the sample towards the subset of developer population using SO, which would not be a representative sample size for a true population sampling in a statistical problem - it would be oversampled in one group to t…

Despite the name, cppreference is the best online (there's always `man 3`, of course) resource I've found for C, too. MSDN is good for C++ as well (usually the second place I check). And the GCC and Clang documentation is generally pretty comprehensive about compiler-specific stuff.

The C and C++ sections of StackOverflow are good for finding language lawyers who can give you an exact answer, with citations, to "is this snippet well-defined?" type questions (the TL;DR is usually "if you have to ask, then it isn't"). But they'll scold you for tagging those sorts of questions with both C and C++, even though it's perfectly reasonable to do.•

—

• If you're asking about C, it's helpful to know whether your program will still have the same behavior when compiled as C++; if you're asking about C++ but your snippet doesn't have anything C++-specific, it's helpful to future viewers if the answers for both languages are in the same place, since more often than not they're the same (which also means it's helpful to make it clear when they aren't).

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#156

Post by RangerScience »

derefr wrote: post #144
ericfrederich wrote: post #138

C programmers start the day a bit later, keep using the language in the evening, and stay up the longest. This suggests C may be particularly popular among hobbyist programmers who code during their free time (or perhaps among summer school students doing homework). ... or they're the only ones stuck down a rabbit hole chasing some obscure memory leak that keeps bugging them until late in the evening.

Naively, there's nothing forcing these developers to chase that leak into the night, rather than into the next work-day. But I do wonder whether some languages have debugging problems that require "keeping more state" to solve them than others, such that the developers doing debugging in those languages would rather forge ahead and finish, than drop it and pick it back up the next day. That'd be an interesting thing…

There's definitely the overhead in re-loading where you were yesterday, although sometimes that's handy - "sleeping on it" does work.

I find (in any work, not just the rare C work) that when I get into a juicy problem I just don't want to stop. It's nothing to do with the task switching / reload cost, it's that I'm interested in what I'm doing.

So I think you're right that it's about what kind of developers a language attracts, but not because it effects the language designers. I think it has something to do with the languages used by people along the "programming is a job" - "code is life" spectrum. Look at Haskell's bump. AFAIK, Haskell is only used by people for whom code is a way of life.

(This is not an endorsement or indictment of either end of that spectrum. Some people who paint are workers, others are craftsmen, others are artists. All use paint.)

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#157

Post by juliangoldsmith »

ericfrederich wrote: post #138

C programmers start the day a bit later, keep using the language in the evening, and stay up the longest. This suggests C may be particularly popular among hobbyist programmers who code during their free time (or perhaps among summer school students doing homework). ... or they're the only ones stuck down a rabbit hole chasing some obscure memory leak that keeps bugging them until late in the evening.

There are tools, such as Valgrind and Dr. Memory, to prevent just that.

With the tools, finding and fixing that sort of issue isn't generally very difficult.

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#158

Post by dbmikus »

rdiddly wrote: post #81
pierrec wrote: post #75

>My final (and favorite) observation is that developers in Paris take the longest and most consistent lunch breaks. Well, if I lived in Paris, I would too. A contributing factor might be that a lot of French companies include meal vouchers in their benefits. Generally employees are given the choice to deduce some amount from their payroll and get nearly double that amount in meal vouchers, because the vouchers are go…

The fact that you work in one of the most beautiful & well-designed cities for walking around or eating outside doesn't hurt either!

There's also a much more relaxed work culture. I'd say that's probably number 1.

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#159

Post by jgtrosh »

rdiddly wrote: post #81
pierrec wrote: post #75

>My final (and favorite) observation is that developers in Paris take the longest and most consistent lunch breaks. Well, if I lived in Paris, I would too. A contributing factor might be that a lot of French companies include meal vouchers in their benefits. Generally employees are given the choice to deduce some amount from their payroll and get nearly double that amount in meal vouchers, because the vouchers are go…

The fact that you work in one of the most beautiful & well-designed cities for walking around or eating outside doesn't hurt either!

Also more money for food usually means more wine usually means more time before return to work

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#160

Post by dmix »

var_explained wrote: post #41
TorKlingberg wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just be aware that the animation makes it look like everyone is using Haskell in the evening. That's false and caused by normalization. Other languages are still more used.

That's right: Haskell is disproportionately used in the evenings, but it's not highly used at any time. You can see in the 4th graph that of the 250 languages considered, Haskell is one of the lowest traffic.

This is assuming that SO is a popular destination for Haskell questions.

Github would be the better indicator. Especially if Github could include anonymous stats for private repos too. That would give a good indication about the commercial viability of the various languages.

I'm one of those people who uses Haskell a lot at night time and I rarely use SO for it. I often find answers in documentation, blog posts, IRC, and books. Whereas during my day job I tend to run into a lot of obscure framework errors when I work with Ruby on Rails or the various weird quirks in Javascript where SO is indispensable. I have different kinds of queries with Haskell rather than copy/pasting error msgs, likewise when I use Erlang/Elixir.

Another example is Reddit:

    /r/python 122.1k users
    /r/javascript 82.4k users
    /r/java/ 51.4k users
    /r/php 40.8k users
    /r/cpp 35.7k users
    /r/ruby 31.1k users
    /r/csharp 28.2k users
    /r/haskell 22.8k users
    /r/golang 20.7k users
    /r/c_programming 19.6k users
    /r/swift 17.1k users
    /r/rust 16.1k users
    /r/sql 13.6k users
    /r/scala 10.4k users
    /r/lisp 10.3k users
    /r/clojure 10.0k users
Haskell is not far behind Ruby, C#, or CPP on Reddit. Yet the difference in the SO chart is dramatic.

But no doubt it's not as popular professionally as other languages, sadly, but it's not quite as fringe as this particular data source indicates.

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