What is going on with measures of programming language popularity? • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by innocentoldguy » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 8:57 PM UTC

I don't put a lot of stock into TIOBE and similar lists because I'm not really sure how that information helps. It seems to me that these lists are measuring ubiquity rather than popularity, which I define as being well-liked. I guess there is value in that, but I'm far more interested in seeing a ranked list of well-liked languages and the reasoning behind those opinions. Slant isn't perfect, but it offers me the sort of pros vs. cons lists that I find much more valuable when selecting a language.

Job prospects/salary is another ranking I'm interested in. For example, I know I can get a JavaScript job on any corner, but is that ubiquity going to cost me in salary? Can I earn more by mastering something like Rust, Elixir, or Erlang?

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

#42

Post by munk-a » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 9:13 PM UTC

munificent wrote: post #39

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 th…

I think the most useful popularity vector of a language is probably "What proportion of good programmers I interview will know a language" that vector would influence what language a company might chose to build a new product in in order to ensure they can find good developers to maintain it.

Actually a better question might be "What proportion of good programmers I interview will know a language in five years".

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

#43

Post by Roboprog » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 9:15 PM UTC

drawkbox wrote: post #13

> 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 languag…

C++: it feels so good when the beating stops

Maybe object Pascal or rust for the less masochistic?

I’m ok with C if need be.

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

#44

Post by bacon_waffle » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 9:21 PM UTC

My day job mostly involves C code, which lives in a company repository; I only rarely search for C specific stuff. Hobby projects - work on OSS in C++/Python, or learning Rust - must result in an order of magnitude more of my language-specific searching and public committing, even though it represents a small fraction of my programming time.

So, for me, searching is mainly related to the learning about a language, not so much using a language. This makes me wonder if the integral over time of search volumes might be a useful measure of language use?

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

#45

Post by justinpombrio » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 9:23 PM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #42

munificent wrote: post #39

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 th…

I think the most useful popularity vector of a language is probably "What proportion of good programmers I interview will know a language" that vector would influence what language a company might chose to build a new product in in order to ensure they can find good developers to maintain it. Actually a better question might be "What proportion of good programmers I interview will know a language in five years".

That's going to vary wildly depending on who you interview, which is going to depend on what sort of thing your company does. A game studio is going to get people that know C and Lua with a fringe group that are excited about Rust, while a big enterprisey company is going to get Java and C# developers with a fringe group that are excited about F#. (Maybe these examples are all wrong, but you get the idea.)

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

#46

Post by discreteevent » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 9:27 PM UTC

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?

And GitHub rankings don't factor in things like the fact that java programmers may be under represented, because they tend to be older with enough experience and contacts to get work - without needing to show a GitHub project (plus if they have kids, they just don't have the time)

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

#47

Post by weberc2 » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 9:28 PM UTC

fabian2k wrote: post #32

weberc2 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be clear, I don't think it measures difficulty, but difficulty is necessarily a driver of the metric. A complex language is going to generate more questions than a small, intuitive language.

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

#48

Post by bacon_waffle » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 9:30 PM UTC

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.

Just about everything around you that uses electricity is programmed with something other than JavaScript, including everything that runs JavaScript.

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

#49

Post by munk-a » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 9:35 PM UTC

justinpombrio wrote: post #45

munk-a wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the most useful popularity vector of a language is probably "What proportion of good programmers I interview will know a language" that vector would influence what language a company might chose to build a new product in in order to ensure they can find good developers to maintain it. Actually a better question might be "What proportion of good programmers I interview will know a language in five years".

That's going to vary wildly depending on who you interview, which is going to depend on what sort of thing your company does. A game studio is going to get people that know C and Lua with a fringe group that are excited about Rust, while a big enterprisey company is going to get Java and C# developers with a fringe group that are excited about F#. (Maybe these examples are all wrong, but you get the idea.)

I absolutely agree, yea, and it's locality based... so up here in Vancouver it's really easy to find people familiar with AWS and system programmer types (Java/C++) along with the strong web development scene adding a lot of availability to react, node, a little bit of remaining angular.

But within that market it's further divided, if you're looking for non-game related Objective-C developers you'd probably be in trouble and so on...

It really is a super complex question, but that's the sort of ranking vector I'd be more interested as opposed to "How quickly do stackoverflow questions get accepted answers?" and I am under no illusion that it'd be super hard to measure.

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

#50

Post by GFischer » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 9:37 PM UTC

thebooglebooski wrote: post #10

I don't really understand how you can measure popularity without doing a census-like survey, reaching out to every developer possible in a coordinated effort. Awhile back, I took a statistics class that explained how polling everyone by calling everyone with a phone landline resulted in a misrepresented sample. The reason: not everyone has a phone landline. And those with phone landlines had a tendency to belong to s…

One example off the top of my head are the billions of lines of Cobol code that are certainly not on GitHub :) .

I'm not sure if Cobol programmers use StackExchange (I guess they do).