JavaScript Is ambiguous these days. How much percentage of the JavaScript popularity is from the backend language Nodejs and how much of it from the client side(html, react, angular, etc)?
Why the distinction? It's the same language.
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?
#72The 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…
This is a false aggregate: https://blog.shortbar.com/false-aggregates-571745b2d483 If I'm writing a game I care about what's most popular with games. If I'm writing an enterprise reservation system, I care about that. These languages really live in completely different universes and I think it's time we acknowledge that. The one-size-fits-all survey of this sort feels like a holdover of a time when software developme…
> You used to be a "programmer". Now you're a data engineer, ops engineer, front-end engineer, back-end/full-stack engineer, ios/android/react, system/OS programmer, etc.
I still wonder when there's actually going to be official training in these specialties, that counts as credentials when seeking employment. As far as I know (and I could be wrong), traditional education tends to be somewhat general.
Which specialty you're qualified for seems to have more to do with what job you happened to hold when the specialization split began, rather than something you deliberately decided to study.
(Okay, I'll admit that there are training courses in all manner of things, but they don't seem like a formal course of study you can actually put on a resume.)
Re: What is going on with measures of programming language popularity?
#73There is an excellent book on such things that I highly recommend: How to lie with statistics Problems like this are part of why we have sayings like: Measure twice, cut once. GIGO (Garbage in, garbage out) Some saying about measuring to extreme precision, then "cutting with an axe."
> Measure twice, cut once. I always thought that had to do with carpentry and woodworking, not statistics.
Same problem space to my mind: applying math to the real world in some meaningful, useful fashion.
Re: What is going on with measures of programming language popularity?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Specifically, complexity will generate more questions than difficulty.
No, it can’t by definition. Complexity is a type of difficulty. :)
Re: What is going on with measures of programming language popularity?
#75Nor is github a perfect indicator. Some languages promote their own open-source repository hubs, such as https://gitlab.common-lisp.net.
Re: What is going on with measures of programming language popularity?
#76Github ranking by open pull request to me feels the best approach if what you are interested in is trends of language adoption.
Measuring total corpus would be measuring past popularity and may miss trends. Search metrics on the other hand may actually overrate newer languages which may be searched more compared to more mature languages. Opened pull requests sounds like a better metric overall.
Re: What is going on with measures of programming language popularity?
#77JavaScript Is ambiguous these days. How much percentage of the JavaScript popularity is from the backend language Nodejs and how much of it from the client side(html, react, angular, etc)?
Why the distinction? It's the same language.
i guess it depends on what you are looking for?
in the frontend world, it really is only Javascript, so I don't think we need a popularity contest there. and it's in use by practically all the websites in the world as a dynamic renderer.
but when comparing a language like Java, PHP, Node, Python, I really don't want to see the results of frontend Javascript skewing the results. otherwise, one would just assume Javascript is the most popular backend language, but that is not the case, as stated in the article.
article states that one of the rankings had Java as #1 and Javascript as #8. but on the other, JS was overwhelmingly #1 (because it combined both frontend and backend).
you need distinction because frontend and backend are like apples and oranges.
Re: What is going on with measures of programming language popularity?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a false aggregate: https://blog.shortbar.com/false-aggregates-571745b2d483 If I'm writing a game I care about what's most popular with games. If I'm writing an enterprise reservation system, I care about that. These languages really live in completely different universes and I think it's time we acknowledge that. The one-size-fits-all survey of this sort feels like a holdover of a time when software developme…
> You used to be a "programmer". Now you're a data engineer, ops engineer, front-end engineer, back-end/full-stack engineer, ios/android/react, system/OS programmer, etc. I still wonder when there's actually going to be official training in these specialties, that counts as credentials when seeking employment. As far as I know (and I could be wrong), traditional education tends to be somewhat general. Which specialty…
You can totally do a MOOC in any of those things and put it on your CV
Re: What is going on with measures of programming language popularity?
#79The 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…
the Redmonk ranking [1], which is imho much better than TIOBE
What I think many fans of any sort of language popularity survey miss is that there are huge swathes of the industry that simply don’t actively participate in things like SO and GH. All of these results should be qualified as “amongst webdevs” (sorry “full stack engineers”).
Re: What is going on with measures of programming language popularity?
#80Earlier 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.
Why is that even the right direction of the axis? Couldn't you argue that the less energy you need for all your species' activities the better, if all else is equal?