

Programming language popularity - alexk
http://langpop.com/

======
scottdw2
I wouldn't put too much stock in those numbers. To start with, they are not
measuring actual programing language usage. If you want to know which
languages people are using, the only way to really do it is to do a simple
random survey and ask them.

What these statistics do is go to specific communities and attempt to measure
which languages those communities use. Using those numbers to measure language
popularity in the population at large makes the assumption that those
communities are representative of the population at large. That's a faulty
assumption to make.

Do you, for example, think that Slashdot has a large segment of the "Excel VBA
Macro Developer" market posting to it? Probably not.

There are other sites, like Stack Overflow, that show a 2:1 preference for C#
over Java. Does that mean there are 2x as many C# programmers as Java
programmers? No. It just means that more posts on Stack Overflow are about C#
than about Java.

Information about the number of unique books written about a language at a
particular store does not imply anything about popularity. If you considered
"unit sales", that might give you a measure of "popular book subjects", but
not about language usage. For example, it could be possible that Java
programmers buy more books on Java than C# programmers do on C#. Many of the
C++ programmers I know have several books on C++. I don't think that means C++
has more users than, say, Windows batch scripts.

The web site does say "these results are not scientific", but I don't think
that's a strong enough statement. The "scientificness" has to do with how the
data is collected, and how the results are reported. Even if they measured the
same things using scientific means, the numbers still wouldn't imply what they
claim them to imply. A better disclaimer might be "these results are not
useful for making any decisions what so ever."

~~~
chancho
The actual data being shown is very clearly explained. They aren't drawing any
conclusions so I don't see what your problem is. There is a 'Normalized
Comparison' graph but the weights are right there for anyone to adjust. The
authors are very honest about what this data is and what it means. It's just
interesting, nothing more. They don't claim or even imply any of the things
you say they do.

~~~
scottdw2
The name of the site is "lang pop". When the page loads the title bar says
"Programming Language Popularity". The content of the page states:

"We have attempted to collect a variety of data about the relative popularity
of programming languages, mostly out of curiousity."

Those are claims that what they are measuring is a proxy for language
popularity.

My point is that those claims are not valid.

~~~
chancho
You're inferring things based on your own bias. Nowhere on that page did I get
the impression that they even believe, much less claim that those data are
representative of true language popularity. They claim its impossible to
measure. What is popularity anyway? Number of users? Programs? Bytes? A
critical reader would want a definition of that term before drawing any
conclusions, and if you read beyond the first paragraph you'll find that they
define the what they are measuring precisely. Basically you're complaining
that they didn't do enough to discourage lazy brains from jumping to
conclusions.

~~~
scottdw2
The sections that describe the measurements say things like:

"This is a fairly crude approximation of popularity, however, it's worth
including, because all other things being equal, the more popular a language
is, the more pages will exist mentioning it."

"Popular languages are used more in industry, and consequently, people post
job listings that seek individuals with experience in those languages. "

"Books are also a lagging indicator, but a good way to eliminate languages
that aren't "established"."

Those statements indicate that the measurements are proxies for language
popularity. My point is that those statements are not true, that the numbers
do not serve as proxies for language popularity. They are not crude proxies,
they are not lagging proxies, or any other form of proxy.

Most conclusions you could draw from the numbers would be wrong.

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Emore
I'm missing Objective-C. Fairly sure it should be top 20 considering the
overall good quality -- and quantity -- of Mac apps.

~~~
potatolicious
Objective-C (and Cocoa) is notoriously under-documented. Much of what you do
in Mac software development is tribal knowledge, which honestly sucks.

Sites like CocoaDev try to maintain some semblance of a knowledge base, but
it's still woefully inadequate.

Apple refuses to publish code snippets, and their API docs consist of little
more than what you would learn from the header files.

Mac development is a pain in the ass, even though I like Objective-C as a
language :)

~~~
boucher
I can't really say I agree with you. There are a lot of good books on the
subject, there are a lot of great tutorial sites (free) on the web (look at
scott stevenson's work, or cocoa is my girlfriend, or CocoaDev). The mailing
lists are pretty heavily trafficked, as is the #macdev irc channel (if not
always entirely helpful).

The API documentation is better than most development environments I've worked
with. Admittedly, Apple's secrecy problem gets in the way of publicly
acknowledging bugs, missing features, or planned upcoming features. These
things can be frustrating. Apple publishes a large selection of sample code
though. In fact, they ship a lot of it with the developer tools themselves
(plus all the docs), so you don't always have to go looking through the
website.

iPhone development is undeniably worse right now. I imagine this will change
over time, but I agree their is a lot of work to be done on that front.

------
gabrielroth
Odd data point: PHP is well-represented everywhere except Lamda the Ultimate
(no surprise there) and ... Amazon. Why are there so few books on PHP when
it's so well represented in Craigslist job postings?

My best guess is that books are a _really_ lagging indicator, because books
stay in Amazon's database for so long: there's no way for PHP, Python, and
Ruby, or even Perl, to come close to catching up with C and Java, given the
large number of C and Java books published before those languages were even
invented.

~~~
chancho
Perl is older than Java.

~~~
lunchbox
Python is older than Java as well.

~~~
davidw
And so is Tcl for that matter.

------
jules
Does anyone know how many programmers are programming per language? I'm most
interested in Ruby, Python, C#, Java, but any other language would do too.
Very rough figures? Are there 10^4 C# programmers, 10^6?

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davidw
Hey, thanks for posting that... _Argh_ for posting it the one time I took a
vacation in I don't know how long:-)

(It's my site, BTW).

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hendler
Would like to see this in relation to time. A timeline with markers like
"Rails release", or Google App engine/Python.

Normalized results are good though. At first I just read Google - Visual
Basic, D and Delphi all being just a tad more popular than Ruby.

Also thought Haskell would be higher - even if only because of one day at HN.

~~~
chancho
<http://langpop.com/timeline.html>

~~~
hendler
Nice. Thanks for posting that.

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Aron
Another perspective:
[http://www.google.com/trends?q=c%2B%2B%2C+paris+hilton&c...](http://www.google.com/trends?q=c%2B%2B%2C+paris+hilton&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0)

~~~
DTrejo
So on a typical day, C++ is searched about as frequently as Paris Hilton.
Interesting.

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jerryji
Where's HN and Twitter? :)

~~~
jrockway
And github? They even give you the stats: <http://github.com/languages>

(Interestingly, the stats are pretty easy to change. Perl was 2%, then Yuval
Kogman and I moved our repositories there, and got it up to 3%. We advertised
heavily on IRC, and now it is at 6%. Tripling the amount of code on github in
a few weeks is certainly a sign that Perl is not dead. It's also interesting
to consider that Yuval and I are 1% of the open source community ;)

~~~
davidw
github is too new and too unstable in terms of numbers, so far. Last I checked
(a few months ago), Ruby was the most popular language according to github,
which doesn't jive with any of the other data sources (or my own gut
instincts). I've been keeping an eye on it, though. Stackoverflow is another
one that's interesting, but currently has too much bias.

Twitter... hrm. Yeah, might add that in the talk section.

HN... I'd feel kind of bad about having an influence on the numbers myself;-)

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rms
I was curious to see the numbers for Python vs. Ruby. I had expected Python to
be more popular than shown, it seems to range from 2x Ruby to 20% more. I
would think a regression for the changing popularity of each language would
show Ruby passing Python at some point, does anyone think that will actually
happen?

My favorite argument for Python over Ruby was always that Python is more
popular but it seems like that will become less true over time.

------
quizbiz
What's a recommended way to get started with Ruby (on Rails)?

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jsrfded
This data is from 2004.

~~~
alexk
Last data update: Sat Apr 04 23:17:06 +0200 2009

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ilkhd2
Good for knowing what is more marketable.

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bf
I can has LOLCODE?

