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What is going on with measures of programming language popularity?

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Re: What is going on with measures of programming language popularity?

#11

Post by magnetic »

CryoLogic wrote: post #6

I have absolutely no doubts that the most used language is JavaScript - considering nearly every website in existence relies on it. So it's really just a question of methodology. When TIOBE says popularity they must not be talking about usage rates, or if they are perhaps they are specifically sampling some subset of enterprise?

> I have absolutely no doubts that the most used language is JavaScript - considering nearly every website in existence relies on it.

You should have doubts because every website you look at is on a device that most likely has tons of parts written in C.

Pretty much any piece of hardware you run your browser on, irrespective of whether you're looking at a website that has javascript code or not, has some C code running to support your javascript VM, browser, and operating system.

Whether you're on a computer, cell phone, gaming console, IoT device, you name it... you're most likely executing some C code quite frequently. And that's whether you're using a browser or not.

C is still the go-to language (no pun intended) for pretty much all drivers (with certain parts in assembly as needed) of any piece of hardware.

Re: What is going on with measures of programming language popularity?

#12

Post by cestith »

CryoLogic wrote: post #6

I have absolutely no doubts that the most used language is JavaScript - considering nearly every website in existence relies on it. So it's really just a question of methodology. When TIOBE says popularity they must not be talking about usage rates, or if they are perhaps they are specifically sampling some subset of enterprise?

TIOBE is, AFAICT, using a single web search engine (Google) and searching for a string representing the language like "C programming" or "Ruby programming", and taking a count of results. This favors languages that have a lot written about them due to age, or student interest, or whatever leads people to write a web page about a language.

It'd be interesting, and no more or less valid, to see how many paper books and ebooks have been sold on each.

GitHub takes count of the projects on its own site in each language, but that microcosm may not represent other places. Anecdotally, my employer runs private git repos on private servers, and our ratios don't match GitHub's.

Another interesting metric would be number of job openings. Another would be average pay for a developer mainly using a particular language. Another would be asking people in a scientific poll which languages they use and which ones they enjoy using.

Re: What is going on with measures of programming language popularity?

#13

Post by drawkbox »

> TIOBE measures the sheer quantity of search engine hits. PYPL measures how often language tutorials are Googled.

Popularity by who searches for language help like Java or C/C++ is mostly because those are more difficult languages with bigger, historical sprawl and frameworks.

Just using searching for popularity is skewed because people search more so for things they don't know, than ones they do, and harder languages will probably be more searched. Same with tutorials, it only shows what people are learning. However it is somewhat valid in that even languages you use daily you end up searching for solutions and information on docs, community, etc.

The github and repo stats probably give a bigger picture of popularity combined with searching and surveys.

Side note: Personally I think everyone should learn C/C++ and maybe a functional language or a dynamic language like Python in addition to their main languages. Learning C/C++ and building in it is closer to the metal, has memory management and every language you learn after is less difficult. I do love C++ for game development but it helps with learning all other languages as well as all other languages difficulty is downhill from it, and is especially great for memory management, stack/heap understanding, value/reference understanding and C/C++ is empowering in the power/speed of the platforms. To this day still most apps are built with C/C++ under the hood whether directly, exported to or in a virtual machine that is built in it. For highly performant apps/code/systems C/C++ still are king.

Re: What is going on with measures of programming language popularity?

#14

Post by analog31 »

I've used the language popularity indexes to show MBA's that my preferred tool chain isn't some weird obscure thing that I just discovered on the Internet. The numbers were good enough for that purpose, and of course they didn't question the underlying methodology. Perhaps the more useful message for them is that there are in fact more than one or two popular languages, and that they are not all commercial products.

Re: What is going on with measures of programming language popularity?

#15

Post by wink »

dzdt wrote: post #3

The article omits the Redmonk ranking [1], which is imho much better than TIOBE. The Redmonk approach uses github and stackexchange as complementary data sources, and shows a two dimensional main result. The top 20 in the Redmonk ranking are 1 JavaScript 2 Java 3 Python 4 PHP 5 C# 6 C++ 7 CSS 8 Ruby 9 C 9 Objective-C 11 Swift 12 Scala 12 Shell 14 Go 14 R 16 TypeScript 17 PowerShell 18 Perl 19 Haskell 20 Lua Consideri…

Pretty sure I wrote this already at some point, but as a 9 year user who has not really starred anything in the last 8 years I still find this methodology flawed. Probably not as flawed as the other two, ok. Also there are some ecosystems where people don't just really use stackexchange, so those are also way off. Could be huge, could be nil.

Re: What is going on with measures of programming language popularity?

#17

Post by weberc2 »

wink wrote: post #15
dzdt wrote: post #3

The article omits the Redmonk ranking [1], which is imho much better than TIOBE. The Redmonk approach uses github and stackexchange as complementary data sources, and shows a two dimensional main result. The top 20 in the Redmonk ranking are 1 JavaScript 2 Java 3 Python 4 PHP 5 C# 6 C++ 7 CSS 8 Ruby 9 C 9 Objective-C 11 Swift 12 Scala 12 Shell 14 Go 14 R 16 TypeScript 17 PowerShell 18 Perl 19 Haskell 20 Lua Consideri…

Pretty sure I wrote this already at some point, but as a 9 year user who has not really starred anything in the last 8 years I still find this methodology flawed. Probably not as flawed as the other two, ok. Also there are some ecosystems where people don't just really use stackexchange, so those are also way off. Could be huge, could be nil.

Also, StackExchange doesn’t measure popularity, but popularity AND difficulty. All else equal, the harder language will have more SO activity.

Re: What is going on with measures of programming language popularity?

#18

Post by jcranmer »

CryoLogic wrote: post #6

I have absolutely no doubts that the most used language is JavaScript - considering nearly every website in existence relies on it. So it's really just a question of methodology. When TIOBE says popularity they must not be talking about usage rates, or if they are perhaps they are specifically sampling some subset of enterprise?

> I have absolutely no doubts that the most used language is JavaScript - considering nearly every website in existence relies on it.

If you count by total lines of code running in production, then the most likely winner is probably C or COBOL (decent chance your paycheck relies on large COBOL applications working correctly). If you count it by lines of code times number of running instances, then I'm really hard-pressed to pick any other language of C because of its sheer prevalence in things such as cars. If you count by number of programmers, I'm not sure what the winner ends up being.

Even crufty old languages like FORTRAN or COBOL have surprisingly wide usage. Sure, they may be completely absent in user-facing applications, but it's easy to forget that such applications are only a small portion of applications. JS itself would probably end up somewhere in the bottom half of the top 10 in most metrics of "top languages," as it has very little presence outside of user-facing applications.

Re: What is going on with measures of programming language popularity?

#19

Post by wtetzner »

magnetic wrote: post #11
CryoLogic wrote: post #6

I have absolutely no doubts that the most used language is JavaScript - considering nearly every website in existence relies on it. So it's really just a question of methodology. When TIOBE says popularity they must not be talking about usage rates, or if they are perhaps they are specifically sampling some subset of enterprise?

> I have absolutely no doubts that the most used language is JavaScript - considering nearly every website in existence relies on it. You should have doubts because every website you look at is on a device that most likely has tons of parts written in C. Pretty much any piece of hardware you run your browser on, irrespective of whether you're looking at a website that has javascript code or not, has some C code runni…

Right, but even that comes down to what measure of popularity you're using.

E.g., how many people are writing C, vs how many people are using things written in C.

Re: What is going on with measures of programming language popularity?

#20

Post by observr9 »

How about available jobs? I suspect a lot of people are trying to determine which language to invest their time in learning.

Another relevant measure would be ALL jobs, not just available. Some people may not care if a million people are using language X if they're not getting paid for it.

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