
Programming Language Analysis - lauriswtf
http://ec2-54-224-80-201.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8888/languages_visualization/71c6f3773a3cbe2aa440949bc906bd4d/index.html
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davidw
This is tough to do. A while back, I sold off an effort I'd maintained for
several years called [http://langpop.com](http://langpop.com) , which was,
IMO, the best effort out there because I looked for a lot of different data
sources to utilize including source code, google searches, books, and jobs.

One of my conclusions is that there is "popularity" in terms of overall use,
and "acceleration" in terms of something gaining popularity quickly. Cobol is
probably something in the first category. Ruby, when Rails started to take
off, was in the 'accelerating' category.

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pohl
I'm curious, did you consider a 3rd factor – something like enthusiasm or
interest – where a language may be neither in wide use nor necessarily gaining
much adoption but nevertheless garners a lot of attention? I'm thinking maybe
Rust or Haskell?

 _Edit: I don 't mean to slight those two languages, by the way. Both, I'm
sure, are gaining actual adoption at non-zero rates. I just chose them to
illustrate that, perhaps, the level of interest around them may be a bit out
of proportion with either their adoption or their acceleration._

~~~
davidw
I included 'talked about' in the stats for that reason. I guess you could say
that, yes, there are some languages that a lot of people look at and admire
but don't really use that much. Lisp comes to mind as being #1 on that list.

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vorg
Where's top 20 business language Cobol? Only 500 questions on Stack Overflow!
No-one out there running a portmanteau of handles creating screes of trivial
questions and answers to nudge its rank up.

And on Github a message that cries opportunity: "It looks like we don't have
any trending developers for COBOL. If you create a COBOL repository, you can
really own the place. We'd even let it slide if you started calling yourself
the mayor."

~~~
fat0wl
heh yes I always wonder about these analyses -- is the # of questions on SO an
actual correlate to popularity? Or is it the sign of an opaque or buggy
language

It's funny (be warned, this is sortof flamebait i know) I left RoR to enter
the Java world & since then it seems like RoR's popularity is _still_
increasing on these metrics & it is very strong, even though the heyday of RoR
seems to have passed. Many are critical of the new releases / constant
breaking updates etc. and many viable MVC alternatives have emerged.

I think an interesting metric that is never really considered in these reviews
would be "Number of SO Questions per user of the language" \-- basically SO
issues per capita. I think that may actually reveal some interesting facts
about which dev platforms are most seamless to work on.

I appreciate the open source mantra & everything, still work on open source
projects, but it is slightly worrying when I see these languages gaining so
much traction yet having such a massive slew of banal issues ("trivial
questions and answers" \+ things that are broken that shouldn't be, leading to
workaround requests). I guess I have been converted to the evil Java empire
(in fairness, I am diving into Clojure as well). JVM just seems more stable to
me after dealing with everything in Rails breaking all the time & trying to
balance dependencies ("I need to update this to use this, but then this will
break. So I guess I need to update both gems plus Rails itself, but we aren't
budgeted to do a bunch of integration testing right now, so... I guess we'll
get that feature in 2 years or if it is ever backported" \-- Java libs just
seem a lot more robust to me, haven't yet faced an issue like this except for
1 or 2 workable IDE integration issues). OK that last bit really _was_ a
tangent.

~~~
aidenn0
Number of questions on SO correlates to number of people using the language
that are likely to ask questions on SO.

SO skews towards web-programmers and MS stack developers. That clearly affects
a lot of rankings.

Github similarly skews towards web-programmers (as a lot of the first users of
it were RoR related) so you see the upper-right of this graph is mostly web
related.

Also, some langauges have their own preferred forums for support, with a lack
of the critical mass of SO users. If you want an answer to a Common Lisp
question, please visit #lisp on freenode; if you post to SO it will go
unanswered for weeks; it's likely to get answered in a few hours on #lisp.

[edit] And SO also skews towards homework questions.

~~~
fat0wl
yes i see what you're saying. thank you for the intro to freenode! it's real-
time (well, the time it takes for someone to return to computer & read your
question) IRC q/a for Lisp? very cool.

upload the logs & i bet it would be pretty parallel in function to SO. lol, i
feel like their moderation usually only hurts the quality of posts if
anything... if i ask a question that begs any thought or is open-ended in
anyway it is immediately shutdown as an opinionated "asking for favorite
library" question even if the functionality i'm looking for is clearly
delineated -- which is what the real strength of a q/a community should be!!

"I want to do x thing that's never been done before. Based on the existing
libs that do tangentially related things or offer partial functionality, how
should I proceed?" > "My RoR form is giving me an error does anyone know why?"
(usually a typo or outdated syntax because older version docs are no longer
available in the gem community)

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richo
I was very sad to discover that most of the hits (I only checked one page) for
slash on stackoverflow are actually questions involving the slash character
(Generally http request parsing)

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vorg
Developers who use popular language `Visual Basic` for their Github projects
mustn't ever have any problems as they don't ever ask questions on Stack
Overflow. Oh wait, it's tagged differently there, `vb6` and `vb.net`.

~~~
jweir
Yep the tagging needs to be worked on, julia get tagged as julia-lang on SO.
And I am sure many of the languages ranking high on GH but very low on SO will
have the same issue.

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silentOpen
I wish I could click on the languages in the legend and have them color-
coded/labeled in the chart with unselected languages washed out.

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bpedro
Great job!

You might want to prevent anyone from updating your data and influence the
results by applying a document update validation function:
[http://docs.couchdb.org/en/latest/ddocs.html#validate-
docume...](http://docs.couchdb.org/en/latest/ddocs.html#validate-document-
update-functions)

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jweir
Very cool, I have wanted to see something like this for a while.

This chart would be more useful if the dots were language. Expand the chart
out to where the legend is, and drop the legend. (Or move the legend below the
chart, and have it as a table with Stackoverflow as one column and Github as
another).

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pratik661
I think an analysis of which programming language/framework is popular in
which domain/industry would be really helpful.

