Interested in how it breaks down on HN. Add/upvote missing choices in the comments. I added Ruby-on-Rails as a separate item to compare it with non-ROR Ruby.
Hard for me to vote for a single language here. Recently I've been flipping between Go, C and Lua in fairly equal measures. My 'primary' language only exists for some short sample period as by necessity I'm flipping between languages as needed by projects.
The customers from our consulting projects dictate what languages get used, not me. So each new project usually means complete context change in terms of OS and Languages, in regard to the previous one.
Additionally all projects tend to be polyglot to a certain extent.
Python won by quite a large margin, with 77% more votes than #2 Ruby!!!
Hopefully your primary and favorite programming language coincide -- mine definitely do after more than 10 years (Python). One of the good things about the job market these days is that you are less likely to be stuck working with some technology or language that you dislike.
I wonder what the results would be like if you weighted votes with people's distribution of actual usage, e.g people who vote for python but have ONLY used python, their vote wouldn't carry much weight, but someone who had used python, c++, javascript, and ruby, their vote would carry much more weight.
I've spent the last five years in Rails, but finally got the whole "the browser handles the MV* framework" thing with Node.js, and now I've converted myself totally to javascript.
Write backend and frontend code in the same language? Yes please. Longing for that fantastically delicious Ruby syntax? Do everything in coffeescript.
CoffeeScript alleviates the issue. Seriously. I don't really like Ruby/Python (which CS seems to be heavily inspired on) but it's WAAAY better than JS.
It's seamlessly integrated with Node.js. I don't even notice I'm doing coffee, even my files are auto-compiled and minified to JS via express-coffee-script without me or the user noticing.
Or try one of the many alternatives: LiveScript, Coco...
CoffeeScript still suffers from many of the same problems that JavaScript does, as it's basically a very thin syntactic veneer over JavaScript.
Like CoffeeScript's homepage current states, 'The golden rule of CoffeeScript is: "It's just JavaScript".'
The problems with JavaScript are very inherent and at its very core. They aren't the kind of things that are fixed by changing the syntax. While languages like Dart and TypeScript go far beyond where CoffeeScript does, the mere presence of JavaScript underneath still causes problems and forces in limitations.
Which are the problems in your opinion? You mention Dart and TypeScrypt. Does that mean that typing is an issue for you? I actually like dynamic languages, that's why Coffee solved my problem.
Currently I don't do much 'proper' programming and use it mainly for GIS and data analysis and numerical modelling, and occasionally using it for chucking up a simple web front-end to either run or view the results. I have however in the past used it for writing non-trivial desktop GUI applications and web services.
For my current project, it's looking like 70% Python and 30% Javascript (Node.js). It was originally all Python but the Connection Handler (originally written in Twisted) performed poorly, however performance increased and system usage dropped with the switch to Node.js
For me, Node.js is the language I loved to hate. I seriously want to hate it because it's Javascript, but its pretty darn good at what it does. #ProgrammerProblems
is Python really so much more popular than Ruby (RoR), or this is HN case? As I regularly check Germany startup jobs and see Python jobs much less than Ruby/ROR ones.
If you limit yourself to web development at startups then Ruby is probably more popular. If you look at all fields where code is written to solve problems I'm not at all surprised that Python dominates Ruby. In fact I imagine the difference between the two is much larger than the poll shows if you look outside of the HN sphere
I'm guessing it's a reflection of the perceived notion that a non-trivial number of Ruby developers would be completely lost if asked to write even the most trivial CRUD app without using Rails. Basically capturing people who tread ruby as the DSL that Rails happens to use a scripting language, rather than treading Ruby as a freestanding language.
I know half a semesters' worth of C++ and I almost got through Coursera's Python game course (couldn't finish the last two weeks because I just didn't have the time to do it properly) but I can still easily see myself getting most of my work done in js/php.
My most favorites are Javascript and CSS3. Only reason I consider CSS3 somewhat a programming language is because of it's inheritance capabilities now.
C++ for most of my algorithm work and computationally intensive work. C for my system programming work. Java/Python/JavaScript for my web related stuff. No assembly language? :)
Right now my job is in CUDA C/C++ so I voted C, but almost all my personal programming ends up being Haskell (unless I'm doing web stuff which would be Javascript).
Voted for C++. Pretty high points. Unfortunately, this is not reflected in recent "who is hiring" threads. Lets hope for the best in the upcoming one :)
"who is hiring" is a poor metric due to how legacy software works. You'll get a very bad picture of what is actually hot if you only look at what jobs are currently open.
nope, I am still using Delphi 5 and Paradox database for 20+ years old project I maintain (it is like 40% of my working time, rest is Go, Ruby and Objective-C)