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Yes and no.

There are a lot of companies which simply never talk about what they use internally; as such, it's really hard to get an accurate picture of what's really in use, because the only glimpses we get are the (fairly rare) places which choose to be open about what they're doing.

Based on that, and on interesting tidbits picked up from talking to people in the trenches and paying attention to little clues (interesting addresses showing up on mailing lists or IRC, peculiar code quirks, etc.), I suspect that if everybody laid their cards on the table the results would be surprising to people who think they know what the "mainstream" is using (and not just in the "lots of people using Rails/Django sense -- there are many more exotic things out there).




I'm sure you'll acknowledge that neither Rails nor Django is universially more used than PHP is. A better estimate is that PHP is about 100 times more widely used. The discrepancy between that and the results of this poll is so big I can't think of a word in the english language to describe it.


PHP is more widely used, yes, and that's obvious. But I didn't try to say otherwise.

What I'm objecting to is your apparent assumption that use of tools like Django or Rails necessarily sets one apart from "the mainstream", or even that there is such a thing and that it can be quantified.

Or, succinctly: there probably are a lot more people using not-PHP and not-Java than you think. Some are using hip, trendy new things like Django or Rails. Many are still using ancient, forgotten things like COBOL and IBM mainframes (some friends of mine deal with those types of folks on a daily basis). And there are a lot of places that aren't single-language shops, but have an amalgamation of code accreted over the years.

Which all adds up to the fact that you really can't make useful statements about "the mainstream"; all such statements tend, ultimately, to reflect hype machines rather than reality.




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