

Language popularity: It’s not about search engine result counts - rabbitfang
http://capecoder.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/language-popularity-its-not-about-search-engine-result-counts/

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mrmekon
Short of an international software developer cold-call survey, all "language
popularity" estimates are going to be weighted towards some specific
community.

TIOBE seems weighted towards blog/article writers, using GitHub et al. would
be weighted towards the open-source community.. Stack Overflow is also a
fairly cohesive community, though a harder one to name: people who ask for
help in online Q/A sites?

For instance, I'll bet that _none_ of those three communities overlaps much
with government contractors. Within the firms I've worked with, they are very,
very hesitant to even _use_ the Internet, let alone participate in it.
Information comes from dead trees only. They are also staffed by a much older
crowd. And they have a _ton_ of software developers keeping Ada, C, Assembly,
and Forth alive and kicking.

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bbrtyth
I would have ranked SO as beginners and pedantic, humorless editors :)

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cgb
I know some C programmers, and they are hanging out on Usenet newsgroups, not
on StackOverflow.

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jewel
This is an improvement, but this ranking will be biased towards languages that
generate lots of questions. A language that attracts more seasoned developers
that also has decent documentation will rank lower than it should.

~~~
bunderbunder
It's also going to be susceptible to some "popularity contest" skew. For my
part, I've been known to post the sample code for my questions in C# even if
that's not actually the language I'm working in when I hit the problem. C# is
the lingua franca of the platform, so the questions is likely to be seen by a
wider audience that way.

That said, I've wondered for a long time if the Tiobe index is subject to a
potentially much bigger source of skew - namely, I suspect that C, C++ , and
Java get a boost for being three of the most popular languages for people who
spend more time talking about programming than actually programming.

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cgb
The search results can also depend on the titles of popular books. "The C
programming language" matches the TIOBE pattern, "Programming in Scala" does
not.

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rabbitfang
In the case of Tiobe one of the problems is that Scala programmers don't
typically say "Scala programming", but rather "Programming Scala" or
"Programming in Scala" which maps back to the book titles. Tiobe searches for
the specific string "Scala programming"

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timClicks
I've often wondered whether using Stack Overflow as a popularity metric will
create a bias for languages which are hard to learn.

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mthreat
One metric is job postings containing the language:

[http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=java%2C+c%2B%2B%2C+ruby%2C...](http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=java%2C+c%2B%2B%2C+ruby%2C+python%2C+erlang%2C+scala%2C+lisp%2C+clojure%2C+javascript&l=)

edit: fixed spelling of clojure ;)

~~~
6ren
All metrics are imperfect: this one of course over-represents languages used
by employers. It won't capture self-employment (a significant and growing
trend). Also, it's uncomfortably common to advertise for one thing in order to
filter applicants, when the job is actually for something else. (Maybe it's
clever of them, but I've felt cheated by this bait-and-switch.) Along these
lines, ability to pick up lesser skills is assumed. (Perhaps that's why PHP
doesn't appear.)

Stackoverflow/web searches over-represent languages used with the web (esp
Javascript). But, since the web is the fastest-growing industry, it may be an
accurate anticipation.

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siavosh
Wow is this common? I wouldn't be surprised. More and more, I see job posts
that list multiple languages (more than two or three), and I wonder why they
would have such a fragmented setup. But I guess having one script somewhere in
Haskell, for example, might help attract a bunch of smart folks but who are
then asked to write C# all day. There is a large informational gap between
employees and employers unfortunately.

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6ren
Happened to me twice, and Google once boasted about advertising for python to
filter for devs at the forefront - not that they'd actually be doing much
python. I guess one could check in the interview.

