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Is Your Favorite Open Source Technology in Growth or Decline?
- smt88 9y agoStackOverflow data is not appropriate for drawing conclusions about popularity, growth, or decline. For example, it's possible that a language is heavily discussed because it's difficult to use or often used by beginners. This effect would inflate PHP's or R's popularity (many R users aren't primarily programmers), and it would deflate C++'s popularity. I found the same effect on Google about 10 years ago: it was easy to find beginner tutorials for PHP, but very difficult to find ones for C++. You'd also have fewer StackOverflow posts about languages with great error messages, helpful tooling, and static analysis. The question this data really answers is, "Which programming languages are people getting stuck using?" Formulated that way, it's a little bit too broad to be interesting, because "getting stuck" could mean a badly designed language, inexperienced user, or both.