Everyone always list the "top programming languages" or the "fastest growing" ones. I'd like to see the opposite, the "fastest losing/shrinking" ones, would be a interesting list to see which languages people are suddenly using less off.
No, I think ruby would be the fastest shrinking language of the top languages. I want the fastest shrinking language of all of them, not just the top ones.
I'm curious what you would be looking for in that data. Growth rate is relative. So my view of it is if a programming language has 100,000 users but another one has 10,000 users, a 2% reduction of users in one is a lot more meaningful in one over the other. One indicates a severe reduction in popularity, whereas another could just be a blip over time.
Again, this isn't meant to be antagonistic. I'm genuinely curious what you intend on doing with stats overall rather then top languages.
Not looking for anything in particular really, just curious. Both absolute and relative numbers would be interesting to see.
For example, if a language has 10 users and 5 stops using it, that's interesting. If a language has 10000 users and 5000 disappears, that's also interesting. If a language has 3 users and 1 stops using it, that's too interesting.
Seems also just to care about the top languages and their growth/shrink rate, while is interested, doesn't necessary mean it's the fastest shrinking languages overall.
Nice work, a lot of effort and research. In addition it might be worth checking out the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge [0] maintained by the IEEE as well.
There's interesting data but the personal opinions seem weirdly shallow.
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"I was predicting that once all good features of TypeScript end up in JavaScript itself, it would be discarded just like CoffeeScript"
There's almost no "feature of Typescript" apart from typing. We have "?." and "??" now, but that's almost it? Building features on top of JS has always been a non-goal.
Also, "My thoughts on TypeScript did not change, of course" - why "of course"? It's nothing obvious, and revising your opinion is always wise
I would expect more things (especially on typing and classes) to be ported to JS. That's what I meant.
At least, private/static fields, optional chaining & null coalescing (as you pointed out), default parameters are now in JS (almost). I'll add them to the article to make it more clear.
Personally, I'd prefer it if both typing and classes was not in JS, as the problems they solve can also be solved in other ways. Now I already lost the battle around classes but if types somehow becomes mandatory in JS proper, I'd probably leave JS behind me. Now, mandatory typing will never happen in JS and I already kind of left JS behind for ClojureScript, so guess I'm in luck there.
The "Top Programming Languages" slope-graph with gradient is chart-junk and makes my eyes bleed. There are spurious emotional comments throughout.
However, it is sad and somewhat surprising to see South America and Africa so far behind.
Who is surprised that the continent of Africa lags behind? How could anyone, at this point, be surprised by the struggles faced by people across the continent of Africa?
Those two combined have a population of 1.6B. Obviously one would expect them to be behind but having less than 1/3rd of contributions from Europe alone. That is unexpected to me.
What does it mean for non programmers and future of economy for non programmers? I refuse to bow to the notion that everyone should learn to code or become programmers because trucking jobs will be gone.
As white collar automation starts to hit hard over the next 5-10 years, the number of desk jobs will massively decline. Also, most of the remaining people who work desk jobs will be doing some sort of programming.
> I refuse to bow to the notion that everyone should learn to code or become programmers...
Why?
Most programming isn't as hard as people seem to think.
I used to think that a perhaps some really smart middle schoolers can learn enough about programming to build a simple CRUD-based web app: a bit of Python or PHP, just enough SQL (the idea of tables, columns, rows, and cells; SELECT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements), and just enough HTML/Javascript.
However, after doing a few semester-long middle school enrichment activities with randomly (not self) selected students, I am now relatively certain that EVERY "normal" middle schooler can learn enough Python, SQL, and HTML/Javascript to build a CRUD web app.
> ...because trucking jobs will be gone.
Driving a truck is quite a bit more difficult than people seem to think. Frankly, I'm fairly confident that truck drivers will be better off than your average white collar worker, even if trucking is completely automated.
In the world where "everyone at a desk does some programming", any properly educated person within a std.dev. or two of average intelligence will be fine. The only question is whether there will be enough work to go around.
Also (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Job_perf...): ”The US military has minimum enlistment standards at about the IQ 85 level. There have been two experiments with lowering this to 80 but in both cases these men could not master soldiering well enough to justify their costs”.
Yes, 2 full standard deviations would be the higher (ie, lower) extreme of my "within a std.dev. or two" ballpark.
I use that ballpark because I'm told it's (very roughly) the population that my students were randomly selected from. My methodology isn't perfect, to be sure, but I'm not pulling numbers out of thin air :)
The specific criteria is that none of my students had an IEP. And, by definition, everyone more than two standard deviations from mean had an IEP.
Now, probably there are a lot of students with IEPs who are less than two standard deviations from the mean. Hard to know who those students were in terms of the IQ distribution. Probably a lot of them are on the lower end, but possibly learning disabilities are more smoothly distributed than that. And I also don't know how many students were excluded, so even if we knew where to concentrate their mass in the IQ distribution, it wouldn't help.
It's worth noting that this means I also never worked with students who tested above two standard deviations from the mean. "Gifted" students had their own special education that ran concurrently with the period of the day when the enrichment activities were done. I guess the assumption is they'd be fine, but I'm told by some teachers that's not necessarily the case.
What does it mean for non-scribes and the future of the economy for non-scribes? I refuse to bow to the notion that everyone should learn to read and write or become scribes because farming jobs on the lord's plantation will be gone.
I'm being sarcastic but the point is that essential skills change as society advances. Eventually some basic level of coding skill will be just as important as literacy.
"TypeScript adds a great deal of complexity both in tooling and dependencies, and I do not think that it is worth it."
The subjective parts of that statement are the author's opinion and fine enough, but I am confused by the "dependencies" part. TypeScript is a single self-contained dependency. Especially in the context of the larger web ecosystem where to do almost anything else you do need a million dependencies, I find this remark pretty confusing.
