

Programming Language Framework Traction on Hacker News - PixelRobot
http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2011/03/17/framework-traction-on-hacker-news

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jasonkester
Interesting to note that Spring sees a yearly surge in interest between
February and April. Are you sure you cleaned your data correctly, or did you
just search by keyword?

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sogrady
@jasonkester: the dataset only spans 14 months, so i'm not quite sure what you
mean by yearly surge in interest. there are very definite horizontal seasonal
fluctuations, though, it's true.

as to the second question, matching is simply by keyword, or at least the
regular expression equivalent.

~~~
d0mine
March to May is a spring (season). If you see a surge in interest between
February and April it might mean that Spring (framework) has nothing to do
with it.

~~~
sogrady
Ah, ok: the argument is that HN members will be mentioning "spring" with
increasing frequency during the matching season of time?

To answer then, no. The data is not cleansed for those purposes, so discount
the Spring data as you will.

FWIW, a regular expression match for season returns 1940 results across the
entire HN dataset, which spans 49 months, meaning that the number of context
independent mentions of that word are ~40 month.

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dimmuborgir
It's interesting how Django manages to get good mention on HN. But the fact
is, there are very few job opportunities for Django developers compared to,
say, Rails developers. Even on the supply side, its difficult to find Django
developers for startups.

~~~
timc3
Perhaps its because for one we could hire anyone with Python skills or
secondly anyone that is proficient in computer science can usually pick up
Python quickly.

~~~
dimmuborgir
I don't think you could just hire a Python programmer who has never done web
programming. And even if he has some experience in web programming, Django has
its own share of learning curve to master.

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estel
Are these normalised for the site's growth?

~~~
sogrady
@estel: no, the charts are not adjusted for the growth of HN itself.

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wpeterson
Rails seems an ideal language for startups, but I was still surprised to see
how highly it plays on HackerNews.

Lot's of great quotes in this article from earlier this week about why
startups in Boston are using Rails:

[http://bostinnovation.com/2011/03/22/boston-companies-
using-...](http://bostinnovation.com/2011/03/22/boston-companies-using-ruby-
on-rails/)

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astrofinch
More data:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1843083>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=750142>

etc. You can search on google with "site:news.ycombinator.com" as a prefix and
get useful results on pretty much anything startup-related.

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keyle
I think the languages that's going to win is the one providing the best value
and the easy adoption. I tend to go for nodejs. How many times a language is
mentioned does not necessarily reflect its power or its capabilities.

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beck5
Although Spring and Rails do similar things I think they serve two different
roles. A more accurate comparison would be something like the Play! Framework,
which would barely register (unfortunately)

~~~
rbanffy
All web frameworks do similar things. The important point is what kind of
thing each of the doesn't do. Spring doesn't avoid writing tons of
boilerplate, specially compared to Rails.

~~~
St-Clock
At its core, Spring provides some niceties such as dependency injection,
resource location, validation, and data binding, all for POJOs: you can use
these features in a regular app or in a web app. For other features such as
persistence, you can see Spring as a meta-framework wrapping other frameworks
(e.g., hibernate).

Spring Framework thus go way beyond web frameworks.

 _Disclaimer: I'm not a huge fan of Spring and I don't like "meta-frameworks",
but to qualify it as a "web framework" is diminutive at best._

~~~
rbanffy
And nothing Java can be diminutive ;-)

Sorry. I have only used Spring in web-application contexts. The app I am
currently maintaining (and going bald because of it) is not a shiny example of
elegance and probably doesn't make Spring look particularly good either.

Just as a side note, I wouldn't consider Java for web applications (because we
have much better experiences with Django and Rails), but I wouldn't rule it
out as easily for desktop apps. And I am also looking for an excuse to play
more with Clojure.

~~~
gthank
A _lot_ of Spring code predates the rising popularity of "convention over
configuration" (thank you, Rails, for getting this so widely accepted), so if
you're in one of those code bases, you're going to see a _LOT_ of the Java+XML
verbosity that led to everyone lampooning Java.

In exchange, you get a ton of flexibility. You probably only need 5-10% of it,
but that 5-10% is _NICE_. The ability to do clean testing of your data tier,
for instance, is glorious when you first experience it. Goodbye, horrible
ResultSet mocks!

If you're lucky enough to work on a codebase that fully embraces autowiring
and all the spiffy new annotations, then you get all this awesome stuff, but
with virtually none of the crazy XML configuration stuff that makes it
impossible to just trace the source and figure out what the hell is going on.

For Java web frameworks, Play! <http://www.playframework.org/> is definitely
on the top of my list for green-field projects. I've only used it on small
things so far, but it really seems to have learned the lessons of Django and
Rails.

<https://github.com/weavejester/compojure> is on my To-Try list for Clojure
stuff. Until I get around to it, I'm just monitoring buzz on the web, but so
far it's been mostly positive.

~~~
rbanffy
I heard very good things about VRaptor (<http://vraptor.caelum.com.br/en/>).
It may be able to convince me to forgive Java.

