

Stackoverflow, analysis of users, "question difficulty", 12 languages - gtani
http://leonmesserschmidt.com/post/856152793/which-programming-language-is-best

======
bdfh42
I think that the premise that you can judge a language's difficulty based upon
the ratio of unanswered question on StackOverflow is fundamentally flawed.

Intuitively we know that C is not a simple language to master and a quick
check on unanswered questions from (say) JavaScript indicates that the great
majority are about DOM manipulation and not the language itself. Thus I would
suggest that an analysis that rated JavaScript as more difficult than C is
using the wrong metrics.

I would expect that languages with relatively low usage but also relatively
expert proponents (with some enthusiasm for the topic - Scala??) were more
likely to be of an interesting and technical nature and get a prompt and
effective response.

In other, perhaps high volume, areas we might expect a proportion of questions
to remain unanswered if they are uninteresting or frequently asked.

[EDIT] Perfect example popped up on HN a few minutes later see
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7828865/javascript-
matrix...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7828865/javascript-matrix-
calculator-with-html-form) . This is a UI problem - how to restrict user entry
to a valid matrix and to only process the input for valid entries. This is not
by any real stretch a JavaScript problem.

Given the nature of the question, then a full answer would be lengthy to
prepare (I would use jQuery and some client side code to manage the data entry
area) and it might thus go unanswered.

