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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?

#31

Post by baxtr »

yen223 wrote: post #2

What's going on is that there are many equally-valid definitions of "popularity". Do you mean number of developers who's heard of a language? Who uses a language? Who likes a language? Or do you mean a language that's most widely deployed, for some definition of deployed? The question you need to ask is what decision is going to be impacted as the result of knowing the "popularity" of some language. The answer to tha…

That’s similar to asking: which species is the most successful one? By which measure? Bio-mass? Space occupied?

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

#32

Post by fabian2k »

weberc2 wrote: post #17
wink wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not convinced that SE activity measures difficulty. But it certainly is affected by much more than just popularity. I could imagine it measuring the total API surface, as you can ask more questions about larger subjects.

It's certainly a deeply flawed measure, but then pure search engine hits like TIOBE are likely much worse.

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

#33

Post by esrauch »

weberc2 wrote: post #17
wink wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is also skewed towards what slightly-beyond-beginners use; many true beginners haven't discovered it, many experienced people more easily find the same answers without posting.

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

#34

Post by bobbyi_settv »

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?

It may be true that Javascript is the most used language for "websites", but the percentage of programmers who work on websites is tiny.

Take any big company, go to their jobs site and browse through tech jobs to get a rough sense of what portion involve building websites with Javascript.

As one random example, I just glanced at Bank of America (http://careers.bankofamerica.com/search-jobs.aspx), a $300bn company that employees 200k people, and if I look at "Technology", I see pages of Java/ .Net/ Hadoop roles before I get to the first UI/ website/ frontend one.

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

#35

Post by WiseWeasel »

baxtr wrote: post #31
yen223 wrote: post #2

What's going on is that there are many equally-valid definitions of "popularity". Do you mean number of developers who's heard of a language? Who uses a language? Who likes a language? Or do you mean a language that's most widely deployed, for some definition of deployed? The question you need to ask is what decision is going to be impacted as the result of knowing the "popularity" of some language. The answer to tha…

That’s similar to asking: which species is the most successful one? By which measure? Bio-mass? Space occupied?

Ooh, that's an interesting question. I'd have to go with highest total energy consumed through their metabolism and activities. Those with the highest chemical impact on the planet.

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

#36

Post by submeta »

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.

Then, in the web sphere you'd have to focus on PHP (in Germany). But then again, looking at the details, you will realize that those job offers ask for developers who are fluent in: php, JavaScript, css, mysql, Photoshop (!), wordpress (!), etc. Reads like a job offer from the beginning of 2000.

But the sheer numbers cannot be ignored: Java / c# >> php >> Python >> Ruby/Rails >>>> Clojure... (Just one example)

Now you'd have to go into the details again to answer the question if you'd want to work at the problem set that is described in the job offer (how sophisticated, what kind of domain, how challenging,...)

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

#37

Post by faizshah »

fhoffa wrote: post #24
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...

It would be interesting to see this combined with the github commits dataset on bigquery and compared to the redmonk ranking. The redmonk ranking is slightly different from the state of the octoverse ranking.

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

#38

Post by baxtr »

WiseWeasel wrote: post #35
baxtr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s similar to asking: which species is the most successful one? By which measure? Bio-mass? Space occupied?

Ooh, that's an interesting question. I'd have to go with highest total energy consumed through their metabolism and activities. Those with the highest chemical impact on the planet.

Please don’t backward engineer the metric so that we will win ;-)

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

#39

Post by munificent »

The TIOBE index is hot garbage, and always has been.

Even so, this article is also pretty bad. Nowhere does the author define what he means by "popularity", which is one of the key problems all of these popularity contests suffer.

If we say "Language X is more popular than language Y?" What does that mean? Answers could be any of:

* Total extant corpus of X is larger than Y.

* Number of people who know X is larger than Y.

* Amount of open source code in X is greater than Y.

* Number of people currently writing X (how much?) is greater than Y.

* Number of people who want to be writing X is greater than Y.

* Number of jobs available for writing X is greater than Y.

* Number of people talking about X is greater than Y.

These are all wildly different metrics but all have reasonable claims to represent "popularity" and/or are what some of these rankings claim to show.

To do anything useful, you really need to know what problem the reader is trying to solve and pick a metric that helps that problem. Is the reader trying to decide what language to learn to find a job today? To get ahead of the curve and be an expert in five years? To discover a new exciting language? To choose a language to use for a large, conservative project? A small ambitious one?

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

#40

Post by WiseWeasel »

baxtr wrote: post #38
WiseWeasel wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ooh, that's an interesting question. I'd have to go with highest total energy consumed through their metabolism and activities. Those with the highest chemical impact on the planet.

Please don’t backward engineer the metric so that we will win ;-)

Yeah, factoring in activities certainly gives us the advantage. I suspect most people have an idea of success more along the lines of mass of other species consumed. That seems unfair to plants though.

I feel some measure of chemical impact of the species to be the most level playing field, and that relative total energy consumption is close to the core of the question.

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