
Can you name the 25 most popular programming languages? - SandB0x
http://www.sporcle.com/games/moogles/programlanguages
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hga
Cool.

Also check out the related Hello, World! test
<http://www.sporcle.com/games/psychofish25/hello_world_syntax> (where you
really want to see if what language you type in matches the slot you think it
should be in). Brought back some old memories.

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uggedal
21/25 with SQL, Assembly, Actionscript, and Delphi missing. What happened to
Smalltalk?

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Jeema3000
I'm always kind of suspect of these 'programming language popularity'
measurements because they usually rely on search engine result volume. I think
a more meaningful metric would be, say, job openings by programming language.

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oscardelben
This is nice as well
<http://www.sporcle.com/games/psychofish25/hello_world_syntax>

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Sephr
Wouldn't JavaScript be print('Hello, World!') instead of
document.write('Hello, World!')? The DOM isn't part of JavaScript; it's just a
common environment. I would assume that the official JavaScript shell's
environment would be assumed instead.

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wolfgke
Or rather: alert('Hello, World!')

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steadicat
Since when is SQL a programming language?

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davidw
I put that on the list just to piss pedants off.

If you're not careful, I'll put HTML on there to see you really squirm:-)

Kidding aside, it's there because I think it's interesting to see where it
stacks up against other things.

(By the way, the list I am referring to, is of course the original site at
<http://LangPop.com> \- I had nothing else to do with this quiz)

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drunkpotato
Turing completeness should be the minimal standard to be considered a
programming language. SQL is a pseudo-relational query & update language. HTML
is a markup language. Both are useful. Neither are programming languages.

There are SQL extensions to make it Turing complete, because Turing
completeness is pretty darn useful.

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davidw
Absolutely correct, but I don't really give a shit :-) I'm curious to see how
it fares against other languages. I'd rather have more data than less. You can
always use a magic marker to cover it up on your computer screen if it offends
you.

There's a reason behind things like that too. It's a good check on the results
to see how well SQL does in, say, job listings, where one listing might be a
hit for both Java and SQL, as opposed to Ohloh, where, yes, SQL is going to be
present in many projects, but not a majority of the code. And that makes
sense, because pretty much anyone out there is going to know and use some SQL,
so as a job skill, it's extremely popular.

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Auzy
How is D is on the list? And how is Objective C less popular than Lisp?

I'd be curious to see where this list comes from...

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SandB0x
Yeah I doubt it's in any way accurate. You can get a very rough guide (albeit
skewed towards .net) from <http://stackoverflow.com/tags>.

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davidw
It apparently uses my stats at <http://LangPop.com> . While the numbers are
rough, and there are some (stated) biases, I think they do a pretty good job
of reflecting reality, and in any case, you get everything broken down with a
normalized chart, so you can play around with the weights of different things.

As to why anything is on that list: because I put it there. In some cases,
after being asked to.

(BTW, I know the IRC numbers for the most recent version are a bit off - I'm
currently working on that).

~~~
SandB0x
Ah, fair enough. I didn't spot the source. If you were omnipotent and could
get at all the information directly, what would you consider to be a true
measure of popularity? (Eg, number of people who know each language, total
time spent writing in each language over the last week)

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davidw
That's a good question! I think that even in that case, the best answer would
be to break things out so that people could see the different categories. The
amount of code in production (this is something where langpop.com likely falls
short: I can't think of any way of getting data on all the COBOL out there
without paying through the nose for it) certainly counts for something in
terms of popularity, but so does the language most people know some of. So
does what's hot these days and being used for new systems being written.

I think, though, that ultimately it doesn't really matter once you get past a
certain threshold and see that people are writing libraries for the language.

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riobard
I guessed 21/25 in the time limit. Missed ones are Shell, ActionScript, Tcl,
and Cobol.

~~~
nostrademons
24/25. Missed ColdFusion.

Why the heck do they put SQL as a language but not HTML, CSS, or Makefiles? I
kept trying variants of those, because once I got SQL anything goes...

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keefe
lol I missed... delphi, coldfusion, scheme,tcl, cobol

