16 ms·

What programming languages are used most on weekends?

782 points by minaandrawos 10y ago

anotheryou 10y ago
"actionscript 3" what? o_O I thought this is over
- to3m 10y ago
  Probably still good for prototyping...
- thebigkick 10y ago
  there is a lot of Flash out there in the Ad and Video world
  - anotheryou 10y ago
    it's the a safe alternative yet? self contained, animated and not touching the rest of the site.
- liquidise 10y ago
  I was going to comment on this as well. As someone who worked in AS3 heavily but left it years ago, i wonder the cause of this. My guess is not that adoption is increasing, but instead that the expertise has long since evacuated the field, leaving people who work in AS3 hard-pressed to find answers within their departments.
- kristianp 10y ago
  I would guess it's for recreational stuff like animation and games.
  - freehunter 10y ago
    I haven't been able to find a better animation suite than Flash. You don't have to export to flv, you can make a video from it. But the drawing tools and the onion skin with the ability to layer frames on top of each other, I haven't found anything to compete with it. And why draw everything by hand when you can script some of the animation with ActionScript?
    - vertex-four 10y ago
      There's a bunch of TV animation done with Flash. It's quite a versatile tool.
- PeterisP 10y ago
  It is, so that's why people who get an urgent task to maintain something in AS3 are quite likely to need and use stackoverflow.
- Matthias247 10y ago
  Adobe AIR / Flex Framework was probably also used for lots of intranet or business applications and not only browser based stuff. For these usecases AIR is still actively supported, and I guess a few companies still work on it and maintain their applications. I also know of a few embedded systems that used Actionscript/AIR for their graphical user interface. These also have a long lifecycle and need to be maintained. Although I doubt that most of these would get any new features.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Not at all, after the issues with Apple, Adobe created an AOT native compiler for flash, so it is still used a lot by media folks.
tempestn 10y ago
One thing that caught my eye is that at least of the tags included in their scatter plot, there appear to be more weekend searches than weekday searches on average overall, especially for the most popular tags. (And note that the X axis is logarithmic, so those will have a much larger effect on total searches.) I wouldn't have expected that. Perhaps weekdays are more geared toward 'getting things done', so weekends are when people have time to learn.
AnimalMuppet 10y ago
No big surprise that nobody works on sharepoint or XSLT as a weekend hobby.
- moosinho 10y ago
  Come on, you don't like to tinker with SharePoint Server configuration templates in your free time?
  - protomyth 10y ago
    I get the feeling that some pieces of software constitute 100% billable / work time. Sharepoint would probably be pretty high on that list. I do confess to studying BizTalk Orchestrations on my own time, but that was for research into the area not the product specifically.
  - santaclaus 10y ago
    No share point but nothing beats some salesforce to unwind on a Saturday evening.
- dunham 10y ago
  A year or two ago, on a weekend, I wrote some XSLT to transform old-school Pages'08 documents to html. But I don't make a habit of working with XSLT.
- irontoby 10y ago
  Haha, since Subversion was born in the height of XML frenzy, they figured it was a good idea for the built-in web interface to just output XML and a default XSLT. That way if anyone wanted to customize it, they could do so to their heart's content by just specifying a different XSLT. I loved Subversion at the time, and so created the TortoiseSVN Menu plugin [1] for Firefox, and an accompanying XSLT to add lots of rich info and styling into the main UI. It's something that should have been pretty simple but I remember spending lots of my free time back then to get it just right. Funny thing is, since I worked on it at home but mostly used it at work, I really could have used a good distributed VCS at the time :D [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tortoisesvn-menu/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tortoisesvn-m...
hellofunk 10y ago
My weekends are usually pretty rough and unstable, so I went with this one several months ago and it fits well into my life style: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck
tedmiston 10y ago
It might also be interesting to see which tags are used more in the early mornings or evenings vs during the workday. Edit: I hadn't seen Kaggle before today, but it looks very easy to hack on the SO data set [1] with a Jupyter notebook. [1]: https://www.kaggle.com/stackoverflow/stacklite https://www.kaggle.com/stackoverflow/stacklite
- m0sa 10y ago
  The SO data is also available on Google's BigQuery [1] [1]: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/stackoverflow https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/stackoverflow
nirv 10y ago
Happy to see Python-3.x taking over old Python.
- freehunter 10y ago
  Old Python, I like that. Sounds like my manager in a recent conversation: "Don't say [competing product name], say 'the legacy [product type]'. It drives home the idea that our product is the future and that product is the past." I'm not making any judgement on the status of the Python community, just appreciating your choice of wording.
  - nirv 10y ago
    Welp, apparently all managers have something in common…
- d0mine 10y ago
  In last 6 months: Mass Momentum python-2.7 11915 -1.97% python-3.x 14987 4.33% http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/90306/compare-size-and-growth-trends-for-stackoverflow-tags?Tag1=python-2.7&Tag2=python-3.x http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/90306/comp...
brink 10y ago
I don't think the number of questions asked correlate with which languages are used the most. My weekends are mainly Java, but I don't need to post on stack overflow because all of my questions have been already addressed.
- jeremyjh 10y ago
  Presumably that is also true for people who use Java during the week.
- bbarn 10y ago
  Yeah, this is basically what I came to say. Haskell's search volume could be because it's more difficult to use than other languages, or is more poorly documented. It would certainly explain Sharepoint being so high during the work week, having struggled with Sharepoint Configuration Mountain before.
  - ryeguy 10y ago
    That doesn't explain a relative search increase on the weekend. The stats shown are not cross-language comparisons.
    - bbarn 10y ago
      You're right. Score one for misleading graphs next to each other though. The X axis scale for the right one makes it look much more dramatic than the left side, which is actually the real story.
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    Hum... If you look at the later graph, Haskell's volume is among the lowest volumes of anything there. What really makes sense. SO format does not suit Haskell very well.
    - zingplex 10y ago
      Could you elaborate on why Stack Overflow is ill-suited to Haskell?
wimagguc 10y ago
One way I use Stackoverflow’s dev stats is to make educated guesses about the easiness of finding developers in 2-3 years time to maintain now-greenfield projects. Does Ruby seem to go down while Python is in steady growth? Let's move away from Rails. Swift is picking up steam? It's safe to switch from Objective-C. This dataset seems to be just fantastic for that.
- segmondy 10y ago
  In my opinion, that's what's wrong with the world. Chasing tech, pick something solid and stick with it. I have seen developers barely get decent in one language only to drop it and learn a new language. Picking up the basics of a language is easy, but it's knowing the nuisance that separates the professional from the amateur.
  - bottled_poe 10y ago
    It's much easier to be a rockstar developer when the pool of developers is so small. The game of chasing the "best" technology is pretty much a ponzi scheme.
  - bootload 10y ago
    "Picking up the basics of a language is easy, but it's knowing the nuisance that separates the professional from the amateur." From learning perspective correct. I don't think developers chase new languages, I think it's more, play 'catch up to latest language' to be more employable. You would hope companies, CTOs, lead techs choose languages to solve the unique business problems. Language choice looks more, to me, like taste. Like choosing something ^nice^ from a menu at a restaurant depending on what is palatable.
    - segmondy 10y ago
      I can't tell, I know many developers today who are on the new shiny js thing, golang, elixir, scalar, rust train, but they never got really good in their first language be it Java, python, or php. They use linux or OSX. But they don't know awk/sed/bash, give em a very simple problem, they would write 1000 line of OOP, united test code when a few line of scripts would solve it. I know many programmers, who graduated with a CS degree, they go out of their way to implement ridiculous rule engines and overly complicated systems, when they can just use prolog and glue their app to prolog. I've witnessed many so called fullstack developers who break out in cold sweat at the sight or thought of writing SQL. They want an ORM. This is what I call chasing, new things, when the old things are rock solid. I see this today, where people cry about PHP, but yet don't even use it's good features. Go use NoSQL solutions but never even had a clue about their SQL DB. /rant
ThePhysicist 10y ago
Not many Sharepoint enthusiasts out there, it seems.
- dagurp 10y ago
  It's a horrible product
  - cyberferret 10y ago
    Sharepoint should have been a great product for small to medium businesses, as well as government departments but yeah, it had horrible, horrible implementation and deployment issues. How I wish it had less .Net centricity and more adaptability to build or consume services in other languages and protocols - it could have been a killer business platform...
    - bigger_cheese 10y ago
      I work for a pretty large organisation (multiple office sites, multiple countries etc). Our intranet runs on sharepoint and every time I've had to edit a page or create a new page etc I find it frustrating as hell and don't get me started on permissions problems. From the users perspective it is pretty handy. There are a heap of non technical people (HR, accountants, operators etc.) Being able to drag and drop spreadsheets from a Windows desktop into a sharepoint library is almost a killer feature makes it very easy for non technical people to collaborate on documents across multiple sites (provided the aforementioned permissions problems do not occur). Our plant operators use it to upload overtime spreadsheets and share them between shifts, people use it to share powerpoint slide decks for meetings and upload the minutes afterwards etc. I'm from the generation before we had Sharepoint back then we used Mapped network shares to move documents around (or emails - but we had 50mb limit imposed by exchange) - permissions issue were even worse. We recently started using Facebook's "Workplace" which is basically a private facebook instance for our organisation. People are starting to use that instead of sharepoint - from what I've seen anyone can make a "group" in workplace and it is so much easier then setting up a sharepoint page. Adoption is pretty slow but some teams are starting to use workplace groups rather than sharepoint for recurring meetings etc. So I'm hoping it will finally kill Sharepoint here.
BinaryIdiot 10y ago
Wow I'm surprised to see ExtJS on a list of "most used" anything. I mean don't get me wrong it's great if you want to prototype something quick that uses data but for a great UX / real application it's dreadful to use IMO.
- Macha 10y ago
  You might be reading the chart wrong. Its position basically means "most overrepresented on weekdays compared to its own weekend volume"
  - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
    Oh in comparison. Hmm didn't get that the first time through.
netinstructions 10y ago
Somewhat related, if you're looking to compare tags from StackOverflow, I made this site[1] a couple years ago to quickly visualize how many questions and answers are out there for given tags. I use StackOverflow tag count as well as Google Trends and GitHub star count to get a rough feel for how much people are using certain things, such as version control software[2], databases, or view engines in Express[3]. [1] - http://www.arepeopletalkingaboutit.com/ http://www.arepeopletalkingaboutit.com/ [2] - http://www.arepeopletalkingaboutit.com/tags/cvs,svn,git,perforce,bazaar,mercurial http://www.arepeopletalkingaboutit.com/tags/cvs,svn,git,perf... [3] - http://www.arepeopletalkingaboutit.com/tags/ejs,pug http://www.arepeopletalkingaboutit.com/tags/ejs,pug
Impossible 10y ago
The answer might be as simple as "people tend to work on games on the weekend", either as hobby projects or that professional game developers work weekends more often, skewing the weekend results away from serious enterprise apps. This would explain both the rise in low level languages but also things like OpenGL, Unity3D and Actionscript 3. It doesn't explain Haskell, of course, but I think the Haskell explanation in the article is accurate.
meerita 10y ago
I do a lot of HTML/CSS(Sass) using Middleman. Sometimes, I do Ruby.
jlas 10y ago
Also interesting to see the weekend dips in google trends, e.g. Java: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%201-m&q=java https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%201-m&q=jav...
- scotty79 10y ago
  Not sure if that's relevant. Same dips can be seen for JS: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%201-m&q=%2Fm%2F02p97 https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%201-m&q=%2F... And on the Stack Overflow it seems that JS has perfect balance of workdays vs weekends.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ziikutv 10y ago
Assembly is too vague of a tag
- gragas 10y ago
  "algorithms" as well
minaandrawos 10y ago
I was kinda surprised that Go (golang) wasn't up in the list
- OJFord 10y ago
  I was expecting to see Rust - I thought it was a considerably 'hotter' language than reflected by its current use in the wild. Also, I find SO's coverage of it lacking. So maybe it's more about people sourcing the information elsewhere - relatively good docs, active and helpful community in IRC, and more Q&A on Reddit (albeit mostly - again, anecdotally - out of date, but still) than SO.
  - civility 10y ago
    This chart was not what I expected: http://www.arepeopletalkingaboutit.com/tags/ocaml,scheme,rust,go,haskell,swift,ruby,c,c++,python http://www.arepeopletalkingaboutit.com/tags/ocaml,scheme,rus...
    - OJFord 10y ago
      That's not so surprising, is it? Unless I'm missing something that graph's all time - there's definitely tonnes of Python Q&A on SO, and as I (anecdotally) described above, not much Rust. That graph would be better titled "Have people talked about it".
      - civility 10y ago
        > Unless I'm missing something that graph's all time Yeah, I missed that. I thought it was recent history. If we normalized by years available, Swift seems like an outlier with Go lesser so.
  - santaclaus 10y ago
    > I was expecting to see Rust - I thought it was a considerably 'hotter' language than reflected by its current use in the wild. Rust is pretty hot on Hacker News and r/programming, but even working in a systems-language-heavy field, I haven't seen too much mindshare (outside of some friends at Mozilla). It is kind of a shame, both Rust and D are doing really cool things, and I'd love to see more penetration!
slg 10y ago
I surprised there was no mention in the blog post or the comments so far about the homework factor. It isn't just personal side projects that people are working on over the weekend. I am betting the relative percentage of CS students on the site is also much higher on the weekend. Tags like assembly, pointers, algorithm, recursion, class, and math are all rather vague. Those topics are all discussed at length in CS classes, but if you are working on a real world project in those fields, odds are you will tag it with a more specific technology you are using rather than the abstract theory behind it. EDIT: On second look, Python, C, and C++ are also the go to languages for CS classes (along with Java but that is also a big enterprise language unlike the other three.) Almost this whole list seems to be schoolwork related.
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  > On second look, Python, C, and C++ are also the go to languages for CS classes And so is Haskell. But I doubt Unity 3D is schoolwork related.
  - beefsack 10y ago
    I used Haskell for a significant portion of my CS education, it's possible you aren't far from the mark.
    - zzzzzzzza 10y ago
      I went to ut austin and after a long time using haskell for intro classes the administrators succumbed to temptation (and possibly pressure from dell/ibm for wage slaves) maybe ~10 years ago and started using java. It was kind of horrible because the professor for (at least one of the) intro classes reproduced cons, car and cdr from lisp and had us construct a bunch of data structures out of this monstrous java lisp hybrid. point being probably only top tier cs depts use haskell.
      - rifung 10y ago
        I don't think it has anything to do with the "tier" as I believe UT Austin used Haskell because of Dijkstra: http://chrisdone.com/posts/dijkstra-haskell-java http://chrisdone.com/posts/dijkstra-haskell-java MIT has also switched to Python from Scheme
wtvanhest 10y ago
It may be better to group like languages/frameworks and compare them over time: Django vs rails for example. Comparing languages heavily used by acedemics may skew things since they often work on the weekends. Or game development languages vs webapp languages.
legostormtroopr 10y ago
Given the current user revolt over there regarding recent political shenanigans by the mods (and CEO), I'd be keen to see how their trends track over the next few years. http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342903/well-always-endeavor-to-do-whats-right-well-try-to-do-it-better-next-time?noredirect=1&lq=1 http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342903/well-always-e...
- freehunter 10y ago
  If there is a "user revolt" over something like that, whether you feel the post was right or wrong, that necessarily implies there is competition to SO and people can move to another community. I am not going to get involved in politics here or question your statement, what I'm asking is this: where would people go? What's the competition to SO? If people decided they didn't like Joel's views on politics, they'd load up another browser tab and type in "www." [what?] ".com". HN isn't going to answer why ActiveRecord is sorting my psql object backwards. Quora isn't going to help me figure out why Lua counts from 1 instead of from 0. Reddit isn't terribly friendly to my questions about Java regex vs PHP regex. If I was offended by Joel and wanted to voice that by leaving the site, where would I turn?
  - legostormtroopr 10y ago
    You get to a certain point in your experience where you have fewer questions to ask, and most of the questions I do have are already answered. Its possible to continue to use SO without contributing to it, which is what quite a few people in that thread had said they would do.
    - sah2ed 10y ago
      > You get to a certain point in your experience where you have fewer questions to ask, and most of the questions I do have are already answered. That assertion is correct if you are at the cusp of retirement. For most people, they'll need to re-tool by picking new technologies during their careers to round out their experience. The blunt truth is that, not keeping up with new languages/frameworks/stacks etc will mean that such folks will become very unemployable long before they reach 50 [0] unless they transition into a management role. [0] http://liveblog.co/users/davewiner/2015/05/06/iWouldHaveHiredDougBut.html http://liveblog.co/users/davewiner/2015/05/06/iWouldHaveHire...
espeed 10y ago
Exploring StackOverflow Data - Evelina Gabasova (2016) [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlKZKN7il7c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlKZKN7il7c
- KurtMueller 10y ago
  She uses F# ◎[▪‿▪]◎. That's my weekend language that I'm trying to turn into my weekday language.
dmozzy 10y ago
Also somewhat related. I made this site to show you the popularity of programming languages on Stack Overflow by countries and US states: http://soversus.com http://soversus.com
dvnguyen 10y ago
Coincidently I've just read several chapters from the Learn you a Haskell book. I couldn't write any serious Haskell project in near future, but learning it has been so much fun. No surprised when many other programmers are touching it on weekends.
- sjakobi 10y ago
  LYAH is great for getting a first taste of Haskell! Once you want to write more serious programs, I'd highly recommend that you get http://haskellbook.com/ http://haskellbook.com/ – it's very well structured and goes all the way to practical, real-world programs.
Xeoncross 10y ago
I can see room for lots of false assumptions when reading this data. What if Haskell never changes the rate at which it is discussed - but all the entry programers doing the 9-5 job go away on the weekends helping Haskell to be "louder"? What if the people with homework ask more on the weekend than during the week? What if certain developers don't post questions tagging a language - but rather tagging an algorithm knowing they can implement it in whatever language they need? What if Haskell only works on the weekend?
- dualogy 10y ago
  > What if Haskell only works on the weekend? A few years ago the answer would have been, "the rest of the week it compiles"
wcbeard10 10y ago
The funnel shape of the scatter plot immediately reminded me of an article on the insensitivity to sample size pitfall [0], which points out that you'll expect entities with smaller sample sizes to show up more often in the extremes because of the higher variance. Looks like the tags with the biggest differences exemplify this pretty well. [0]- http://dataremixed.com/2015/01/avoiding-data-pitfalls-part-2/ http://dataremixed.com/2015/01/avoiding-data-pitfalls-part-2...
- platz 10y ago
  Is it really a 'sample', if they are reporting on the entirety of their data for a given period? Is the question interpreted as extending to those not on stackoverflow, or is it a complete census of the 'population' of their data?
  - smaddox 10y ago
    I would argue it's a sort of (nonrandom) proxy sample in the sense that they're sampling a fraction of the people actually programming on the weekend.
    - platz 10y ago
      Ok, so if we make sure we're only talking about: > "what languages tend to be **asked about** on weekends, as opposed to weekdays?" and: > "explore differences between **questions that are posted** on weekdays and weekends." as opposed to the article title: > "What Programming Languages Are **Used Most** on Weekends?" (emphasis added), is the problem then resolved?
  - _pastel 10y ago
    It really doesn't matter - at least, not for the statistical error the parent is talking about. The effect isn't related to whether we are sampling from a larger population of programmers. Suppose there were no difference between the usage of each language, and people just program on the weekends vs weekdays with some probability independent of language. Then, if a language has lots of users, it will likely have close to the average weekend/weekday proportion. The fewer users the language has, the more likely that it has an uneven weekend/weekday proportion just by chance. And if you plot the weekend/weekday proportions vs. the number of users, you expect a funnel shape just like the one in the article. Therefore, the plot in the article - by itself - provides no evidence that there is any difference between the usage of different programming languages.
deepnotderp 10y ago
Python.
monokrome 10y ago
Seriously, though, if you are going to post the following thing in your article then just reconsider: "Warning: the following section involves googling usernames and reading the first page of results for the people involved. This may be unethical. I apologize in advance." Obviously your apology means nothing if you are doing it anyway.
- matt_kantor 10y ago
  I don't see this anywhere in the linked article. What am I missing?
grandalf 10y ago
Wouldn't StackOverflow questions equate to confusion about the language rather than use, or at least use heavily weighted by confusion?
- bigtunacan 10y ago
  Typically people post a question to StackOverflow because they are confused, but it seems unlikely that people are more/less confused about any given topic based on it being a weekday versus a weekend so relative usage makes sense.
dlandis 10y ago
I didn't see the word "legacy" technology used in the article, but I think a lot of the stuff in the weekday column is exactly what people associate with the word legacy. I mean soap and xslt !? That is straight from the darkest era of bloated J2EE apps.
- cgh 10y ago
  Actually back in the day, it was Microsoft who was pushing SOAP the hardest. Don Box, one of SOAP's creators, is a "technical fellow" at Microsoft. This is the same guy who coined the term "COM is love". Dark days indeed.
  - flukus 10y ago
    Using SOAP to do programming across networks was also part of their .net "vision" at least according to the marketing I saw, I think this was how it got the .net name in the first place. Then it eventually came out and the reaction was "oh, it's a java clone".
sAbakumoff 10y ago
Relevant research : StackOverflow questions referenced in the source code hosted on Github http://sociting.biz http://sociting.biz
kaghaffa 10y ago
Visualizations that are more accessible would be great. I have red-green deficiency so I can't differentiate the lines on the charts for the life of me..
c3534l 10y ago
Everyone is pointing out potential problems with the methodology, but really this matches up pretty well with experience. SQL, MS Office stuff, boring things like logging, and testing all show up as being about work. Haskell is actually infamous for having an evangelical following and limited real-world uses. And, yeah, your C-like languages work well for both work and side-projects. This all makes perfect sense. The only thing I'm surprised about is assembly being for pleasure (maybe hardware people?), and web stuff being as versatile.
- mightybyte 10y ago
  > Haskell is actually infamous for having an evangelical following and limited real-world uses. That may have been true 15 or more years ago but is not the case any more. I've been using Haskell almost exclusively for the last 7 years for everything from financial analysis to web back ends to, most recently, web front ends.
thomasfoster96 10y ago
> We defined weekends using UTC dates... ...which means quite a few Saturday mornings in Asia have been counted as weekdays and many late Friday nights in the Americas have been counted as weekends. It would be great if StackOverflow had information on the local timezone that the question was asked in. Seeing Mon-Fri 9-5 vs other times would be interesting.
- cpeterso 10y ago
  If Stack Overflow doesn't retain the local time zone for posts, they could just use the subset of UTC weekend hours that don't overlap business hours in any time zone.
  - thomasfoster96 10y ago
    But the subset of UTC weekend hours that don’t overlap would be pretty small, though?
coretx 10y ago
Not even a single Rust mention. Hmmm. Not sure if I'm a weekend-idiot or simply ahead of the crowd. Let's hope it's because of Rust developers both strongly disliking and never experiencing _stackoverflows_. ;+)
- ajdlinux 10y ago
  The Rust community has very active official forums that probably get more Rust questions than SO. Alas, I don't think Rust's safety properties can guarantee you don't have stack overflows ;)
- olivier1664 10y ago
  Probably because the "rust" keywoard hasn't yet the minimum mass to enter in the graph. It has only 6,000 questions* while only the tags with more than 20,000 are plotted. * http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/625410 http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/62541...
harry8 10y ago
Microsoft should really take note of that. That's a huge tick on their woefully uncool meter. Developers, developers, developers, developers don't want to use Microsoft gear unless they're being paid, it would seem.
- doggydogs94 10y ago
  If you work on something all week long, the last thing you want to do is work on the same stuff on the weekend, even if it is cool.
- mattsmith123 10y ago
  Or maybe people just don't want to have to buy their tools/operating system/database etc that they tinker with on the weekend
- 0xcoffee 10y ago
  Take note of what exactly? That less people are asking questions about VS2012, now that VS2015 and VS2017 are out? Also, amount of questions is not necessarily a good way of measuring a languages popularity. If a language is easy to use, it could have a large following, but not many questions. Hard to draw meaningful conclusions from the data posted imo. If you are talking about Sharepoint specifically, then you should mention that in your post. Microsoft has a lot of products, just because one is losing popularity doesn't mean they have lost their focus.
- tim333 10y ago
  I think part of their problem with weekend developers stems from dropping VB6. They used to be "the largest block of developers in the world" [1] and then around 2003 they made "... Visual Basic.NET not backwards-compatible with VB 6.0. This was literally the first time in living memory that when you bought an upgrade to a Microsoft product, your old data (i.e. the code you had written in VB6) could not be imported perfectly and silently. It was the first time a Microsoft upgrade did not respect the work that users did using the previous version of a product." [2] Personally I'd hate that stuff. Probably why most of the weekend languages are open source and can't be discontinued by some corporate overlord. [1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-slow-brain-death-of-vb-net/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-slow-brain-death-of-vb-net... [2] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
doggydogs94 10y ago
In general, the weekday questions are dominated by enterprise products that cost money. The weekend questions are mostly about stuff that is free.
calibas 10y ago
Javascript, all day every day.
kriro 10y ago
I'd be more interested in Github commits on weekends vs. weekdays as that is likely to be a better indicator of side projects (due to the "homework factor"). Or maybe Gitlab commits or private Github commits since public Github commits are FLOSS and thus likely to include more side project commits than another data sets.
- tumbling_stone 10y ago
  Interesting idea. I'll give it a go this weekend.
deleted 10y ago
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taylorh140 10y ago
I am tired of people confusing programming languages and domain specific languages. Sql is not Turing complete.
- MrCoates 10y ago
  Where does it say a programming language has to be turing complete?
  - taylorh140 10y ago
    From Wikipedia: Some, but not all, authors restrict the term "programming language" to those languages that can express all possible algorithms I am Some.
kc10 10y ago
This doesn't necessarily mean the most used languages. Probably these are the languages that developers are trying to learn and post the questions. And other languages such as C#, Java have reached certain state that people may not have lot of questions, so certainly the activity would decrease and doesn't mean lot of people don't use these languages.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
quadcore 10y ago
Oh that's a wonderful idea. Someone should - continue to - study the differences between weekday and weekend hacking. Programming languages, but also methods, productivity, value for customers, etc. The way I would like the world is that the weekend hacking has way better methods, languages, productivity and value for customers.
lngnmn 10y ago
Python? If noyt it should, because there is no better prototyping/bootstrapping language and definitely there is no better culture than that which emerged around this language. Only Scheme of old days could be compared to have similar similar balance of features and culture of careful attention to details, which, basically, defines a craft approaching (turned into) an art.
sytelus 10y ago
The surprising thing is actually that a significant number of people seems to be spending weekends in preparing for interviews[1] 1. example "recursion", "algorithm"
alkonaut 10y ago
TL;DR: On weeekends people either do homework if they are students or play with the languages they would like to work with, if they work in some SharePoint salt mine during the week.
codesushi42 10y ago
You don't use recursion or pointers professionally? On what world are you considered a real world programmer?
- yetihehe 10y ago
  In most of today "real world" languages you can't use pointers.
  - vbezhenar 10y ago
    If you can get NullPointerException, then you are using pointers. May be you meant that you can't use pointer arithmetic, but pointers are used almost everywhere.
    - yetihehe 10y ago
      If you can't use pointer arithmetic, you don't use pointers. Your language uses them internally, but not you. NullPointerException in Java/C# is a result of a leaky abstraction.
      - bluejekyll 10y ago
        Yeah, they could just as easily have made it a NullException and not lost any meaning. Or better yeah, they could have made a null safe language ;)
      - vbezhenar 10y ago
        > If you can't use pointer arithmetic, you don't use pointers. Is it someone's definition of pointer? > Your language uses them internally, but not you. I'm actively using pointers that point to object. > NullPointerException in Java/C# is a result of a leaky abstraction. I don't agree. Java has uses pointers (which also called references and those are synonyms for Java), Java has concept of null pointer and I don't see why NullPointerException is leaky abstraction.
        10y ago
yazinsai 10y ago
Are number of questions asked a good determinant of language popularity? One would think the "ideal" programming language would be so intuitive that it would have a much lower questions asked to usage ratio. The two might not be that strongly correlated.
tzury 10y ago
Just quoting a comment from the page itself: According to the infographic, most people spend their week struggling to get a document out of SharePoint; whereas on weekends, they write cool algorithms in Haskell, C, C++11 or assembler. This is a surprisingly accurate reflection of the situation on the ground, from what I hear from people around me. Now the question is: how can we swap the weekend for the week, so that more people can do more of the cool stuff? http://disq.us/p/1fzpzr5 http://disq.us/p/1fzpzr5
joelthelion 10y ago
Not looking good for Microsoft...
rodionos 10y ago
The number of new questions tagged by mainstream language has been relatively stable (python) or decreasing (java, js, php) in 2016. http://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/c1acecc0/3/#fullscreen http://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/c1acecc0/3/#fullscreen If anything, it might suggest that the knowledge base coverage is reaching a plateau. It would be interesting to watch how many questions are tagged as duplicates. The ratio is probably increasing.
Musaab 10y ago
C# doesn't get the love it deserves because everyone loves to rag on Microsoft. I think Bill Gates should be in prison, but C# deserves better :)
cdnsteve 10y ago
Cmon, nobody is doing SOAP work on the weekends!? ;)
wslh 10y ago
Sidenote: I always feel limiting that you cannot use Haskell in the weekend in your Android or iOS mobile phone or tablet. I think this is a natural environment for learning. There are some Haskell apps in the app store but they are not official or they are using tricks like executing the code in a remote server.
whatever_dude 10y ago
As someone who just started using Assembly on my weekends, I find these results shocking.
poorman 10y ago
I'm going to assume Haskell has the most asked questions because it's one of the most confusing languages.
problems 10y ago
The curve for Selenium on this graph is the weirdest thing: https://i.stack.imgur.com/LUQei.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/LUQei.png Anyone want to speculate why this may be?
- manikinmelt 10y ago
  This is strange. My wild guess is that 2012 was around the time that every new programmer thought they could get rich making some shitty mobile app. Maybe this represents a temporary skew in web-vs-mobile popularity correcting itself?
officialjunk 10y ago
without factoring in time zones, this contains some friday and monday usage, no?
luckystartup 10y ago
This just makes me so glad that I don't have to spend my weekdays working with sharepoint, SOAP, excel, VBA, and internet explorer.
vonnik 10y ago
nothing against haskell, but this is funny: http://classicprogrammerpaintings.com/post/143847262458/haskell-meetup-edward-hopper-oil-on-canvas http://classicprogrammerpaintings.com/post/143847262458/hask...

782 points by minaandrawos 10y ago

anotheryou 10y ago

"actionscript 3" what? o_O I thought this is over

to3m 10y ago
Probably still good for prototyping...
thebigkick 10y ago
there is a lot of Flash out there in the Ad and Video world
- anotheryou 10y ago
  it's the a safe alternative yet? self contained, animated and not touching the rest of the site.
liquidise 10y ago
I was going to comment on this as well. As someone who worked in AS3 heavily but left it years ago, i wonder the cause of this. My guess is not that adoption is increasing, but instead that the expertise has long since evacuated the field, leaving people who work in AS3 hard-pressed to find answers within their departments.
kristianp 10y ago
I would guess it's for recreational stuff like animation and games.
- freehunter 10y ago
  I haven't been able to find a better animation suite than Flash. You don't have to export to flv, you can make a video from it. But the drawing tools and the onion skin with the ability to layer frames on top of each other, I haven't found anything to compete with it. And why draw everything by hand when you can script some of the animation with ActionScript?
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    There's a bunch of TV animation done with Flash. It's quite a versatile tool.
PeterisP 10y ago
It is, so that's why people who get an urgent task to maintain something in AS3 are quite likely to need and use stackoverflow.
Matthias247 10y ago
Adobe AIR / Flex Framework was probably also used for lots of intranet or business applications and not only browser based stuff. For these usecases AIR is still actively supported, and I guess a few companies still work on it and maintain their applications. I also know of a few embedded systems that used Actionscript/AIR for their graphical user interface. These also have a long lifecycle and need to be maintained. Although I doubt that most of these would get any new features.
pjmlp 10y ago
Not at all, after the issues with Apple, Adobe created an AOT native compiler for flash, so it is still used a lot by media folks.

tempestn 10y ago

One thing that caught my eye is that at least of the tags included in their scatter plot, there appear to be more weekend searches than weekday searches on average overall, especially for the most popular tags. (And note that the X axis is logarithmic, so those will have a much larger effect on total searches.) I wouldn't have expected that. Perhaps weekdays are more geared toward 'getting things done', so weekends are when people have time to learn.

AnimalMuppet 10y ago

No big surprise that nobody works on sharepoint or XSLT as a weekend hobby.

moosinho 10y ago
Come on, you don't like to tinker with SharePoint Server configuration templates in your free time?
- protomyth 10y ago
  I get the feeling that some pieces of software constitute 100% billable / work time. Sharepoint would probably be pretty high on that list. I do confess to studying BizTalk Orchestrations on my own time, but that was for research into the area not the product specifically.
- santaclaus 10y ago
  No share point but nothing beats some salesforce to unwind on a Saturday evening.
dunham 10y ago
A year or two ago, on a weekend, I wrote some XSLT to transform old-school Pages'08 documents to html. But I don't make a habit of working with XSLT.
irontoby 10y ago
Haha, since Subversion was born in the height of XML frenzy, they figured it was a good idea for the built-in web interface to just output XML and a default XSLT. That way if anyone wanted to customize it, they could do so to their heart's content by just specifying a different XSLT. I loved Subversion at the time, and so created the TortoiseSVN Menu plugin [1] for Firefox, and an accompanying XSLT to add lots of rich info and styling into the main UI. It's something that should have been pretty simple but I remember spending lots of my free time back then to get it just right. Funny thing is, since I worked on it at home but mostly used it at work, I really could have used a good distributed VCS at the time :D [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tortoisesvn-menu/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tortoisesvn-m...

hellofunk 10y ago

My weekends are usually pretty rough and unstable, so I went with this one several months ago and it fits well into my life style: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck

tedmiston 10y ago

It might also be interesting to see which tags are used more in the early mornings or evenings vs during the workday. Edit: I hadn't seen Kaggle before today, but it looks very easy to hack on the SO data set [1] with a Jupyter notebook. [1]: https://www.kaggle.com/stackoverflow/stacklite https://www.kaggle.com/stackoverflow/stacklite

m0sa 10y ago
The SO data is also available on Google's BigQuery [1] [1]: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/stackoverflow https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/stackoverflow

nirv 10y ago

Happy to see Python-3.x taking over old Python.

freehunter 10y ago
Old Python, I like that. Sounds like my manager in a recent conversation: "Don't say [competing product name], say 'the legacy [product type]'. It drives home the idea that our product is the future and that product is the past." I'm not making any judgement on the status of the Python community, just appreciating your choice of wording.
- nirv 10y ago
  Welp, apparently all managers have something in common…
d0mine 10y ago
In last 6 months: Mass Momentum python-2.7 11915 -1.97% python-3.x 14987 4.33% http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/90306/compare-size-and-growth-trends-for-stackoverflow-tags?Tag1=python-2.7&Tag2=python-3.x http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/90306/comp...

brink 10y ago

I don't think the number of questions asked correlate with which languages are used the most. My weekends are mainly Java, but I don't need to post on stack overflow because all of my questions have been already addressed.

jeremyjh 10y ago
Presumably that is also true for people who use Java during the week.
bbarn 10y ago
Yeah, this is basically what I came to say. Haskell's search volume could be because it's more difficult to use than other languages, or is more poorly documented. It would certainly explain Sharepoint being so high during the work week, having struggled with Sharepoint Configuration Mountain before.
- ryeguy 10y ago
  That doesn't explain a relative search increase on the weekend. The stats shown are not cross-language comparisons.
  - bbarn 10y ago
    You're right. Score one for misleading graphs next to each other though. The X axis scale for the right one makes it look much more dramatic than the left side, which is actually the real story.
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  Hum... If you look at the later graph, Haskell's volume is among the lowest volumes of anything there. What really makes sense. SO format does not suit Haskell very well.
  - zingplex 10y ago
    Could you elaborate on why Stack Overflow is ill-suited to Haskell?

wimagguc 10y ago

One way I use Stackoverflow’s dev stats is to make educated guesses about the easiness of finding developers in 2-3 years time to maintain now-greenfield projects. Does Ruby seem to go down while Python is in steady growth? Let's move away from Rails. Swift is picking up steam? It's safe to switch from Objective-C. This dataset seems to be just fantastic for that.

segmondy 10y ago
In my opinion, that's what's wrong with the world. Chasing tech, pick something solid and stick with it. I have seen developers barely get decent in one language only to drop it and learn a new language. Picking up the basics of a language is easy, but it's knowing the nuisance that separates the professional from the amateur.
- bottled_poe 10y ago
  It's much easier to be a rockstar developer when the pool of developers is so small. The game of chasing the "best" technology is pretty much a ponzi scheme.
- bootload 10y ago
  "Picking up the basics of a language is easy, but it's knowing the nuisance that separates the professional from the amateur." From learning perspective correct. I don't think developers chase new languages, I think it's more, play 'catch up to latest language' to be more employable. You would hope companies, CTOs, lead techs choose languages to solve the unique business problems. Language choice looks more, to me, like taste. Like choosing something ^nice^ from a menu at a restaurant depending on what is palatable.
  - segmondy 10y ago
    I can't tell, I know many developers today who are on the new shiny js thing, golang, elixir, scalar, rust train, but they never got really good in their first language be it Java, python, or php. They use linux or OSX. But they don't know awk/sed/bash, give em a very simple problem, they would write 1000 line of OOP, united test code when a few line of scripts would solve it. I know many programmers, who graduated with a CS degree, they go out of their way to implement ridiculous rule engines and overly complicated systems, when they can just use prolog and glue their app to prolog. I've witnessed many so called fullstack developers who break out in cold sweat at the sight or thought of writing SQL. They want an ORM. This is what I call chasing, new things, when the old things are rock solid. I see this today, where people cry about PHP, but yet don't even use it's good features. Go use NoSQL solutions but never even had a clue about their SQL DB. /rant

ThePhysicist 10y ago

Not many Sharepoint enthusiasts out there, it seems.

dagurp 10y ago
It's a horrible product
- cyberferret 10y ago
  Sharepoint should have been a great product for small to medium businesses, as well as government departments but yeah, it had horrible, horrible implementation and deployment issues. How I wish it had less .Net centricity and more adaptability to build or consume services in other languages and protocols - it could have been a killer business platform...
  - bigger_cheese 10y ago
    I work for a pretty large organisation (multiple office sites, multiple countries etc). Our intranet runs on sharepoint and every time I've had to edit a page or create a new page etc I find it frustrating as hell and don't get me started on permissions problems. From the users perspective it is pretty handy. There are a heap of non technical people (HR, accountants, operators etc.) Being able to drag and drop spreadsheets from a Windows desktop into a sharepoint library is almost a killer feature makes it very easy for non technical people to collaborate on documents across multiple sites (provided the aforementioned permissions problems do not occur). Our plant operators use it to upload overtime spreadsheets and share them between shifts, people use it to share powerpoint slide decks for meetings and upload the minutes afterwards etc. I'm from the generation before we had Sharepoint back then we used Mapped network shares to move documents around (or emails - but we had 50mb limit imposed by exchange) - permissions issue were even worse. We recently started using Facebook's "Workplace" which is basically a private facebook instance for our organisation. People are starting to use that instead of sharepoint - from what I've seen anyone can make a "group" in workplace and it is so much easier then setting up a sharepoint page. Adoption is pretty slow but some teams are starting to use workplace groups rather than sharepoint for recurring meetings etc. So I'm hoping it will finally kill Sharepoint here.

BinaryIdiot 10y ago

Wow I'm surprised to see ExtJS on a list of "most used" anything. I mean don't get me wrong it's great if you want to prototype something quick that uses data but for a great UX / real application it's dreadful to use IMO.

Macha 10y ago
You might be reading the chart wrong. Its position basically means "most overrepresented on weekdays compared to its own weekend volume"
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  Oh in comparison. Hmm didn't get that the first time through.

netinstructions 10y ago

Somewhat related, if you're looking to compare tags from StackOverflow, I made this site[1] a couple years ago to quickly visualize how many questions and answers are out there for given tags. I use StackOverflow tag count as well as Google Trends and GitHub star count to get a rough feel for how much people are using certain things, such as version control software[2], databases, or view engines in Express[3]. [1] - http://www.arepeopletalkingaboutit.com/ http://www.arepeopletalkingaboutit.com/ [2] - http://www.arepeopletalkingaboutit.com/tags/cvs,svn,git,perforce,bazaar,mercurial http://www.arepeopletalkingaboutit.com/tags/cvs,svn,git,perf... [3] - http://www.arepeopletalkingaboutit.com/tags/ejs,pug http://www.arepeopletalkingaboutit.com/tags/ejs,pug

Impossible 10y ago

The answer might be as simple as "people tend to work on games on the weekend", either as hobby projects or that professional game developers work weekends more often, skewing the weekend results away from serious enterprise apps. This would explain both the rise in low level languages but also things like OpenGL, Unity3D and Actionscript 3. It doesn't explain Haskell, of course, but I think the Haskell explanation in the article is accurate.

meerita 10y ago

I do a lot of HTML/CSS(Sass) using Middleman. Sometimes, I do Ruby.

jlas 10y ago

Also interesting to see the weekend dips in google trends, e.g. Java: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%201-m&q=java https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%201-m&q=jav...

scotty79 10y ago
Not sure if that's relevant. Same dips can be seen for JS: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%201-m&q=%2Fm%2F02p97 https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%201-m&q=%2F... And on the Stack Overflow it seems that JS has perfect balance of workdays vs weekends.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

ziikutv 10y ago

Assembly is too vague of a tag

gragas 10y ago
"algorithms" as well

minaandrawos 10y ago

I was kinda surprised that Go (golang) wasn't up in the list

OJFord 10y ago
I was expecting to see Rust - I thought it was a considerably 'hotter' language than reflected by its current use in the wild. Also, I find SO's coverage of it lacking. So maybe it's more about people sourcing the information elsewhere - relatively good docs, active and helpful community in IRC, and more Q&A on Reddit (albeit mostly - again, anecdotally - out of date, but still) than SO.
- civility 10y ago
  This chart was not what I expected: http://www.arepeopletalkingaboutit.com/tags/ocaml,scheme,rust,go,haskell,swift,ruby,c,c++,python http://www.arepeopletalkingaboutit.com/tags/ocaml,scheme,rus...
  - OJFord 10y ago
    That's not so surprising, is it? Unless I'm missing something that graph's all time - there's definitely tonnes of Python Q&A on SO, and as I (anecdotally) described above, not much Rust. That graph would be better titled "Have people talked about it".
    - civility 10y ago
      > Unless I'm missing something that graph's all time Yeah, I missed that. I thought it was recent history. If we normalized by years available, Swift seems like an outlier with Go lesser so.
- santaclaus 10y ago
  > I was expecting to see Rust - I thought it was a considerably 'hotter' language than reflected by its current use in the wild. Rust is pretty hot on Hacker News and r/programming, but even working in a systems-language-heavy field, I haven't seen too much mindshare (outside of some friends at Mozilla). It is kind of a shame, both Rust and D are doing really cool things, and I'd love to see more penetration!

slg 10y ago

I surprised there was no mention in the blog post or the comments so far about the homework factor. It isn't just personal side projects that people are working on over the weekend. I am betting the relative percentage of CS students on the site is also much higher on the weekend. Tags like assembly, pointers, algorithm, recursion, class, and math are all rather vague. Those topics are all discussed at length in CS classes, but if you are working on a real world project in those fields, odds are you will tag it with a more specific technology you are using rather than the abstract theory behind it. EDIT: On second look, Python, C, and C++ are also the go to languages for CS classes (along with Java but that is also a big enterprise language unlike the other three.) Almost this whole list seems to be schoolwork related.

marcosdumay 10y ago
> On second look, Python, C, and C++ are also the go to languages for CS classes And so is Haskell. But I doubt Unity 3D is schoolwork related.
- beefsack 10y ago
  I used Haskell for a significant portion of my CS education, it's possible you aren't far from the mark.
  - zzzzzzzza 10y ago
    I went to ut austin and after a long time using haskell for intro classes the administrators succumbed to temptation (and possibly pressure from dell/ibm for wage slaves) maybe ~10 years ago and started using java. It was kind of horrible because the professor for (at least one of the) intro classes reproduced cons, car and cdr from lisp and had us construct a bunch of data structures out of this monstrous java lisp hybrid. point being probably only top tier cs depts use haskell.
    - rifung 10y ago
      I don't think it has anything to do with the "tier" as I believe UT Austin used Haskell because of Dijkstra: http://chrisdone.com/posts/dijkstra-haskell-java http://chrisdone.com/posts/dijkstra-haskell-java MIT has also switched to Python from Scheme

wtvanhest 10y ago

It may be better to group like languages/frameworks and compare them over time: Django vs rails for example. Comparing languages heavily used by acedemics may skew things since they often work on the weekends. Or game development languages vs webapp languages.

legostormtroopr 10y ago

Given the current user revolt over there regarding recent political shenanigans by the mods (and CEO), I'd be keen to see how their trends track over the next few years. http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342903/well-always-endeavor-to-do-whats-right-well-try-to-do-it-better-next-time?noredirect=1&lq=1 http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342903/well-always-e...

freehunter 10y ago
If there is a "user revolt" over something like that, whether you feel the post was right or wrong, that necessarily implies there is competition to SO and people can move to another community. I am not going to get involved in politics here or question your statement, what I'm asking is this: where would people go? What's the competition to SO? If people decided they didn't like Joel's views on politics, they'd load up another browser tab and type in "www." [what?] ".com". HN isn't going to answer why ActiveRecord is sorting my psql object backwards. Quora isn't going to help me figure out why Lua counts from 1 instead of from 0. Reddit isn't terribly friendly to my questions about Java regex vs PHP regex. If I was offended by Joel and wanted to voice that by leaving the site, where would I turn?
- legostormtroopr 10y ago
  You get to a certain point in your experience where you have fewer questions to ask, and most of the questions I do have are already answered. Its possible to continue to use SO without contributing to it, which is what quite a few people in that thread had said they would do.
  - sah2ed 10y ago
    > You get to a certain point in your experience where you have fewer questions to ask, and most of the questions I do have are already answered. That assertion is correct if you are at the cusp of retirement. For most people, they'll need to re-tool by picking new technologies during their careers to round out their experience. The blunt truth is that, not keeping up with new languages/frameworks/stacks etc will mean that such folks will become very unemployable long before they reach 50 [0] unless they transition into a management role. [0] http://liveblog.co/users/davewiner/2015/05/06/iWouldHaveHiredDougBut.html http://liveblog.co/users/davewiner/2015/05/06/iWouldHaveHire...

espeed 10y ago

Exploring StackOverflow Data - Evelina Gabasova (2016) [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlKZKN7il7c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlKZKN7il7c

KurtMueller 10y ago
She uses F# ◎[▪‿▪]◎. That's my weekend language that I'm trying to turn into my weekday language.

dmozzy 10y ago

Also somewhat related. I made this site to show you the popularity of programming languages on Stack Overflow by countries and US states: http://soversus.com http://soversus.com

dvnguyen 10y ago

Coincidently I've just read several chapters from the Learn you a Haskell book. I couldn't write any serious Haskell project in near future, but learning it has been so much fun. No surprised when many other programmers are touching it on weekends.

sjakobi 10y ago
LYAH is great for getting a first taste of Haskell! Once you want to write more serious programs, I'd highly recommend that you get http://haskellbook.com/ http://haskellbook.com/ – it's very well structured and goes all the way to practical, real-world programs.

Xeoncross 10y ago

I can see room for lots of false assumptions when reading this data. What if Haskell never changes the rate at which it is discussed - but all the entry programers doing the 9-5 job go away on the weekends helping Haskell to be "louder"? What if the people with homework ask more on the weekend than during the week? What if certain developers don't post questions tagging a language - but rather tagging an algorithm knowing they can implement it in whatever language they need? What if Haskell only works on the weekend?

dualogy 10y ago
> What if Haskell only works on the weekend? A few years ago the answer would have been, "the rest of the week it compiles"

wcbeard10 10y ago

The funnel shape of the scatter plot immediately reminded me of an article on the insensitivity to sample size pitfall [0], which points out that you'll expect entities with smaller sample sizes to show up more often in the extremes because of the higher variance. Looks like the tags with the biggest differences exemplify this pretty well. [0]- http://dataremixed.com/2015/01/avoiding-data-pitfalls-part-2/ http://dataremixed.com/2015/01/avoiding-data-pitfalls-part-2...

platz 10y ago
Is it really a 'sample', if they are reporting on the entirety of their data for a given period? Is the question interpreted as extending to those not on stackoverflow, or is it a complete census of the 'population' of their data?
- smaddox 10y ago
  I would argue it's a sort of (nonrandom) proxy sample in the sense that they're sampling a fraction of the people actually programming on the weekend.
  - platz 10y ago
    Ok, so if we make sure we're only talking about: > "what languages tend to be **asked about** on weekends, as opposed to weekdays?" and: > "explore differences between **questions that are posted** on weekdays and weekends." as opposed to the article title: > "What Programming Languages Are **Used Most** on Weekends?" (emphasis added), is the problem then resolved?
- _pastel 10y ago
  It really doesn't matter - at least, not for the statistical error the parent is talking about. The effect isn't related to whether we are sampling from a larger population of programmers. Suppose there were no difference between the usage of each language, and people just program on the weekends vs weekdays with some probability independent of language. Then, if a language has lots of users, it will likely have close to the average weekend/weekday proportion. The fewer users the language has, the more likely that it has an uneven weekend/weekday proportion just by chance. And if you plot the weekend/weekday proportions vs. the number of users, you expect a funnel shape just like the one in the article. Therefore, the plot in the article - by itself - provides no evidence that there is any difference between the usage of different programming languages.

deepnotderp 10y ago

Python.

monokrome 10y ago

Seriously, though, if you are going to post the following thing in your article then just reconsider: "Warning: the following section involves googling usernames and reading the first page of results for the people involved. This may be unethical. I apologize in advance." Obviously your apology means nothing if you are doing it anyway.

matt_kantor 10y ago
I don't see this anywhere in the linked article. What am I missing?

grandalf 10y ago

Wouldn't StackOverflow questions equate to confusion about the language rather than use, or at least use heavily weighted by confusion?

bigtunacan 10y ago
Typically people post a question to StackOverflow because they are confused, but it seems unlikely that people are more/less confused about any given topic based on it being a weekday versus a weekend so relative usage makes sense.

dlandis 10y ago

I didn't see the word "legacy" technology used in the article, but I think a lot of the stuff in the weekday column is exactly what people associate with the word legacy. I mean soap and xslt !? That is straight from the darkest era of bloated J2EE apps.

cgh 10y ago
Actually back in the day, it was Microsoft who was pushing SOAP the hardest. Don Box, one of SOAP's creators, is a "technical fellow" at Microsoft. This is the same guy who coined the term "COM is love". Dark days indeed.
- flukus 10y ago
  Using SOAP to do programming across networks was also part of their .net "vision" at least according to the marketing I saw, I think this was how it got the .net name in the first place. Then it eventually came out and the reaction was "oh, it's a java clone".

sAbakumoff 10y ago

Relevant research : StackOverflow questions referenced in the source code hosted on Github http://sociting.biz http://sociting.biz

kaghaffa 10y ago

Visualizations that are more accessible would be great. I have red-green deficiency so I can't differentiate the lines on the charts for the life of me..

c3534l 10y ago

Everyone is pointing out potential problems with the methodology, but really this matches up pretty well with experience. SQL, MS Office stuff, boring things like logging, and testing all show up as being about work. Haskell is actually infamous for having an evangelical following and limited real-world uses. And, yeah, your C-like languages work well for both work and side-projects. This all makes perfect sense. The only thing I'm surprised about is assembly being for pleasure (maybe hardware people?), and web stuff being as versatile.

mightybyte 10y ago
> Haskell is actually infamous for having an evangelical following and limited real-world uses. That may have been true 15 or more years ago but is not the case any more. I've been using Haskell almost exclusively for the last 7 years for everything from financial analysis to web back ends to, most recently, web front ends.

thomasfoster96 10y ago

> We defined weekends using UTC dates... ...which means quite a few Saturday mornings in Asia have been counted as weekdays and many late Friday nights in the Americas have been counted as weekends. It would be great if StackOverflow had information on the local timezone that the question was asked in. Seeing Mon-Fri 9-5 vs other times would be interesting.

cpeterso 10y ago
If Stack Overflow doesn't retain the local time zone for posts, they could just use the subset of UTC weekend hours that don't overlap business hours in any time zone.
- thomasfoster96 10y ago
  But the subset of UTC weekend hours that don’t overlap would be pretty small, though?

coretx 10y ago

Not even a single Rust mention. Hmmm. Not sure if I'm a weekend-idiot or simply ahead of the crowd. Let's hope it's because of Rust developers both strongly disliking and never experiencing _stackoverflows_. ;+)

ajdlinux 10y ago
The Rust community has very active official forums that probably get more Rust questions than SO. Alas, I don't think Rust's safety properties can guarantee you don't have stack overflows ;)
olivier1664 10y ago
Probably because the "rust" keywoard hasn't yet the minimum mass to enter in the graph. It has only 6,000 questions* while only the tags with more than 20,000 are plotted. * http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/625410 http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/62541...

harry8 10y ago

Microsoft should really take note of that. That's a huge tick on their woefully uncool meter. Developers, developers, developers, developers don't want to use Microsoft gear unless they're being paid, it would seem.

doggydogs94 10y ago
If you work on something all week long, the last thing you want to do is work on the same stuff on the weekend, even if it is cool.
mattsmith123 10y ago
Or maybe people just don't want to have to buy their tools/operating system/database etc that they tinker with on the weekend
0xcoffee 10y ago
Take note of what exactly? That less people are asking questions about VS2012, now that VS2015 and VS2017 are out? Also, amount of questions is not necessarily a good way of measuring a languages popularity. If a language is easy to use, it could have a large following, but not many questions. Hard to draw meaningful conclusions from the data posted imo. If you are talking about Sharepoint specifically, then you should mention that in your post. Microsoft has a lot of products, just because one is losing popularity doesn't mean they have lost their focus.
tim333 10y ago
I think part of their problem with weekend developers stems from dropping VB6. They used to be "the largest block of developers in the world" [1] and then around 2003 they made "... Visual Basic.NET not backwards-compatible with VB 6.0. This was literally the first time in living memory that when you bought an upgrade to a Microsoft product, your old data (i.e. the code you had written in VB6) could not be imported perfectly and silently. It was the first time a Microsoft upgrade did not respect the work that users did using the previous version of a product." [2] Personally I'd hate that stuff. Probably why most of the weekend languages are open source and can't be discontinued by some corporate overlord. [1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-slow-brain-death-of-vb-net/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-slow-brain-death-of-vb-net... [2] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...

doggydogs94 10y ago

In general, the weekday questions are dominated by enterprise products that cost money. The weekend questions are mostly about stuff that is free.

calibas 10y ago

Javascript, all day every day.

kriro 10y ago

I'd be more interested in Github commits on weekends vs. weekdays as that is likely to be a better indicator of side projects (due to the "homework factor"). Or maybe Gitlab commits or private Github commits since public Github commits are FLOSS and thus likely to include more side project commits than another data sets.

tumbling_stone 10y ago
Interesting idea. I'll give it a go this weekend.

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taylorh140 10y ago

I am tired of people confusing programming languages and domain specific languages. Sql is not Turing complete.

MrCoates 10y ago
Where does it say a programming language has to be turing complete?
- taylorh140 10y ago
  From Wikipedia: Some, but not all, authors restrict the term "programming language" to those languages that can express all possible algorithms I am Some.

kc10 10y ago

This doesn't necessarily mean the most used languages. Probably these are the languages that developers are trying to learn and post the questions. And other languages such as C#, Java have reached certain state that people may not have lot of questions, so certainly the activity would decrease and doesn't mean lot of people don't use these languages.

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quadcore 10y ago

Oh that's a wonderful idea. Someone should - continue to - study the differences between weekday and weekend hacking. Programming languages, but also methods, productivity, value for customers, etc. The way I would like the world is that the weekend hacking has way better methods, languages, productivity and value for customers.

lngnmn 10y ago

Python? If noyt it should, because there is no better prototyping/bootstrapping language and definitely there is no better culture than that which emerged around this language. Only Scheme of old days could be compared to have similar similar balance of features and culture of careful attention to details, which, basically, defines a craft approaching (turned into) an art.

sytelus 10y ago

The surprising thing is actually that a significant number of people seems to be spending weekends in preparing for interviews[1] 1. example "recursion", "algorithm"

alkonaut 10y ago

TL;DR: On weeekends people either do homework if they are students or play with the languages they would like to work with, if they work in some SharePoint salt mine during the week.

codesushi42 10y ago

You don't use recursion or pointers professionally? On what world are you considered a real world programmer?

yetihehe 10y ago
In most of today "real world" languages you can't use pointers.
- vbezhenar 10y ago
  If you can get NullPointerException, then you are using pointers. May be you meant that you can't use pointer arithmetic, but pointers are used almost everywhere.
  - yetihehe 10y ago
    If you can't use pointer arithmetic, you don't use pointers. Your language uses them internally, but not you. NullPointerException in Java/C# is a result of a leaky abstraction.
    - bluejekyll 10y ago
      Yeah, they could just as easily have made it a NullException and not lost any meaning. Or better yeah, they could have made a null safe language ;)
    - vbezhenar 10y ago
      > If you can't use pointer arithmetic, you don't use pointers. Is it someone's definition of pointer? > Your language uses them internally, but not you. I'm actively using pointers that point to object. > NullPointerException in Java/C# is a result of a leaky abstraction. I don't agree. Java has uses pointers (which also called references and those are synonyms for Java), Java has concept of null pointer and I don't see why NullPointerException is leaky abstraction.
      - 10y ago

yazinsai 10y ago

Are number of questions asked a good determinant of language popularity? One would think the "ideal" programming language would be so intuitive that it would have a much lower questions asked to usage ratio. The two might not be that strongly correlated.

tzury 10y ago

Just quoting a comment from the page itself: According to the infographic, most people spend their week struggling to get a document out of SharePoint; whereas on weekends, they write cool algorithms in Haskell, C, C++11 or assembler. This is a surprisingly accurate reflection of the situation on the ground, from what I hear from people around me. Now the question is: how can we swap the weekend for the week, so that more people can do more of the cool stuff? http://disq.us/p/1fzpzr5 http://disq.us/p/1fzpzr5

joelthelion 10y ago

Not looking good for Microsoft...

rodionos 10y ago

The number of new questions tagged by mainstream language has been relatively stable (python) or decreasing (java, js, php) in 2016. http://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/c1acecc0/3/#fullscreen http://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/c1acecc0/3/#fullscreen If anything, it might suggest that the knowledge base coverage is reaching a plateau. It would be interesting to watch how many questions are tagged as duplicates. The ratio is probably increasing.

Musaab 10y ago

C# doesn't get the love it deserves because everyone loves to rag on Microsoft. I think Bill Gates should be in prison, but C# deserves better :)

cdnsteve 10y ago

Cmon, nobody is doing SOAP work on the weekends!? ;)

wslh 10y ago

Sidenote: I always feel limiting that you cannot use Haskell in the weekend in your Android or iOS mobile phone or tablet. I think this is a natural environment for learning. There are some Haskell apps in the app store but they are not official or they are using tricks like executing the code in a remote server.

whatever_dude 10y ago

As someone who just started using Assembly on my weekends, I find these results shocking.

poorman 10y ago

I'm going to assume Haskell has the most asked questions because it's one of the most confusing languages.

problems 10y ago

The curve for Selenium on this graph is the weirdest thing: https://i.stack.imgur.com/LUQei.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/LUQei.png Anyone want to speculate why this may be?

manikinmelt 10y ago
This is strange. My wild guess is that 2012 was around the time that every new programmer thought they could get rich making some shitty mobile app. Maybe this represents a temporary skew in web-vs-mobile popularity correcting itself?

officialjunk 10y ago

without factoring in time zones, this contains some friday and monday usage, no?

luckystartup 10y ago

This just makes me so glad that I don't have to spend my weekdays working with sharepoint, SOAP, excel, VBA, and internet explorer.

vonnik 10y ago

nothing against haskell, but this is funny: http://classicprogrammerpaintings.com/post/143847262458/haskell-meetup-edward-hopper-oil-on-canvas http://classicprogrammerpaintings.com/post/143847262458/hask...