
RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 2017 - deepanchor
https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2017/03/17/language-rankings-1-17/
======
krystiangw
The data looks reliable. Especially that it mostly overlap with other similar
stats like this one:

# Language | Popularity | Avg. Salary global

\----------------+------------+------------

1\. Javascript | 30.13% | $60,186

2\. Java | 27.5% | $61,741

3\. Python | 15.58% | $66,353

4\. C# | 12.8% | $66,470

5\. SQL | 10.97% | $54,139

6\. C++ | 9.95% | $69,092

7\. Php | 8.74% | $53,420

8\. Node.js | 8.45% | $64,818

9\. C | 6.28% | $67,720

10.Ruby | 5.08% | $68,478

More stats and details
[https://jobsquery.it/stats/language/group](https://jobsquery.it/stats/language/group)

~~~
hota_mazi
Why is node.js in a separate category of its own? It's not a language, it's a
framework written in Javascript. If anything, shouldn't it have its number
added to the Javascript category?

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geodel
Key things I noticed:

Rust jumped from #47 to #26

Swift jumped from #24 to #16

There is word 'embiggen' before that I knew only 'enlarge'.

~~~
zserge
"A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man." (Springfield town motto)

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m-j-fox
Interesting that Emacs Lisp is way below the line and VimL is way, way, way
below the line.

Is it really that people don't have questions, or maybe they have better
forums for accessing help -- from emacs.stackexchange.com to emacsWiki to IRC.

Not sure if its a sign of a highly usable language, great community outside
stackoverflow or frustration with lack of response from stackoverflow.

~~~
sooheon
Because people use those languages for configuration, and Github is hugely
popular for storing dotfiles. Configs are forked, tweaked, and reuploaded a
lot more than "actual" programs, because popular starter packs and so on get
huge followings, and there is a much smaller barrier to getting started
playing around with them. Meanwhile, they're not really _that_ complex, and
most have other sources of question resolution (inbuilt docs, online
communities often inside GH issues), so not much need to go to S/O.

~~~
m-j-fox
I want to agree, but look where shell and perl are.

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kodfodrasz
What insight do people derive from these rankings?

What can such a "language ranking" be used for?

Why is XML listed as a programming language?

~~~
officelineback
People: What to study, what to choose for personal projects, what to put on
your resume.

Companies: What languages to standardize on

~~~
weberc2
I would be wary of basing those choices on these data. If I just learned about
the concept of programming languages for the first time, I might refer to this
for a vague understanding of which languages are popular--I might not opt to
learn Coq over JavaScript, but it's not obvious from these data that picking
JavaScript will be of greater benefit to my career, interests, or organization
than Scala. This seems like one metric to consider, and not even a very good
one. In particular, popularity on StackOverflow should probably count against
a language, but these rankings consider it a virtue.

~~~
kodfodrasz
SO popularity is neither clearly positive, neither clearly negative.

Why not positive: because if there are lots of questions about something, it
must be very hard, with lots of gotchas, unclear points.

Why not negative: because if there are lots of questions about something, it
must be very popular, so many newcomers have their trivial questions, which do
not necessarily indicate problems about the language.

~~~
weberc2
Right, the SO value is approximately the product of popularity and difficulty;
the GH value is approximately popularity, so if you difficulty is
approximately SO/GH.

~~~
kodfodrasz
If this would be true, then "XML" and ASP would be the hardest languages. Also
this would suggest that TeX for example is simpler to use than Python or Ruby.

I do not think this stands.

~~~
weberc2
Hence, "approximation". In particular, XML isn't a programming language, so
questions about it are more likely to pertain to writing parsers and the like.
TeX users may well have other sources for answering their questions. The
approximation is very rough, but there is clearly a signal in the noise.

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officelineback
Thank you. This is going to help settle a debate here in the office about
whether to standardize on Ruby or Python. (The correct answer being Python, of
course.) /s

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dominotw
Comforting to see Scala up in there. Makes me feel better about the time I've
been pouring in.

~~~
lanna
no idea why you are being downvoted for expressing a valid opinion

~~~
rapfaria
Probably downvoted by someone who has to use sbt daily?

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4wmturner
Interesting how 'Arduino' and 'Bitbake' are considered programming languages
in this list.

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3JPLW
How in the world is "—me Maker Language" in the top 30 by SO rank? I assume
Game Maker Language? But
[http://stackoverflow.com/tags/gml/info](http://stackoverflow.com/tags/gml/info)
only has 190 tags...

------
vgy7ujm
Its a well known fact that languages are not detected correctly on GitHub
(linguist). One example is Perl.

So I would say this data is not 100% reliable, perhaps even very unreliable
for some languages.

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NeverTrump
Has anybody managed to customize powershell for interactive usability?

I'd love to switch from zsh to posh.

~~~
stinos
What do you mean with _interactive usability_ exactly? I use PS daily and
though I'm still learning I haven't got mcuh complaints so far, on the
contrary, object pipeline vs text pipeline is a win imo for what I use it for.
Depending on what version you use, make sure you run it in ConEmu (better
terminal), have PSReadLine (readline, visual tab completion, ...) and Jump-
Location (like z). VSCode integration is good (debugging etc just works),
Visual Studio integration as well probably but haven't tried that, yet.

