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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?

#21

Post by magnetic »

wtetzner wrote: post #19
magnetic wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Absolutely. That's why I reacted to the "most used" criterion.

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

#22

Post by hyperpape »

hirundo wrote: post #7

As a Rubyist I'm pleased with the Github ranking, but how much of that is tilted by Github being a Ruby platform initially colonized by Rubyists?

It's unclear how important it is today, but historically analyses that used Github heavily favored Ruby: https://www.benfrederickson.com/ranking-programming-language....

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

#24

Post by fhoffa »

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…

With Stack Overflow most people measure number of new questions - but that's a partial measure that can lead to wrong conclusions.

How to measure number of pageviews instead? I have a solution!

- https://towardsdatascience.com/these-are-the-real-stack-over...

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

#25

Post by rossdavidh »

jcranmer wrote: post #18
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-pre…

Both R and numpy have had some of their internals written in Fortran, iirc, so the amount of Fortran getting executed may actually be going up. The amount of people programming in Fortran is probably not, though.

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

#27

Post by nielsbot »

observr9 wrote: post #20

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.

Seems like a good suggestion
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