4 ms·

I don't use SO very much, but this poll looks interesting. The most interesting thing (not disclosed in the results) is what people wrote for "other (please sp

by rick_2047 16y ago

I don't use SO very much, but this poll looks interesting. The most interesting thing (not disclosed in the results) is what people wrote for "other (please specify)" in the question "13. Which languages are you proficient in?"

NickPollard 16y ago
I'm very surprised that C# rated so highly - maybe I'm out of touch - has it really gained that much traction? Which sectors is it focused in? Is it largely due it being pushed strongly by Microsoft, or are there other reasons for large takeup?
- chrisaycock 16y ago
  Stack Overflow was created by a very Microsoft-oriented team.
- sp332 16y ago
  I think Jon Skeet attracts them. http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet and (for fun) http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-facts http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-facts :-)
- michaelbuckbee 16y ago
  The initial set of SO users were from the Joel on Software forums and from Coding Horror readers (neither of which were strictly Microsoft development sites, but both had audiences that skewed heavily in that direction). One of the simple genius things that SO did was deliberately not segregate the community into product silos: no C#overflow, RubyOverflow, etc. even though at the beginning there was a fairly vocal outcry from users for them to do so.
- cpeterso 16y ago
  C# is also new "Visual Basic" for many internal corporate development projects.
rquirk 16y ago
The results were downloadable from the website if you took part. I copied the "other" column from the .xls file and here's a sort | uniq -c | head -21 of that table. 2188 people didn't mention other languages. 2188 55 Objective-C 40 Delphi 36 Java 24 VB.NET 19 VB 16 Haskell 14 vb.net 13 Objective C 12 Scala 11 ColdFusion 10 VB.Net 10 ActionScript 9 HTML 8 R 6 Lua 6 F# 5 vb 5 PowerShell 5 objective-c 5 Groovy There were a lot of "objective-c and some comment", so objective-c is even more popular. Other languages in there included: ocaml, assembly, klingon, tcl, fortran, COBOL, and quite a few matlabs. Here's the text file of that column for you to see for yourself http://pastebin.com/wMZUBMub http://pastebin.com/wMZUBMub

NickPollard 16y ago

I'm very surprised that C# rated so highly - maybe I'm out of touch - has it really gained that much traction? Which sectors is it focused in? Is it largely due it being pushed strongly by Microsoft, or are there other reasons for large takeup?

chrisaycock 16y ago
Stack Overflow was created by a very Microsoft-oriented team.
sp332 16y ago
I think Jon Skeet attracts them. http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet and (for fun) http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-facts http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-facts :-)
michaelbuckbee 16y ago
The initial set of SO users were from the Joel on Software forums and from Coding Horror readers (neither of which were strictly Microsoft development sites, but both had audiences that skewed heavily in that direction). One of the simple genius things that SO did was deliberately not segregate the community into product silos: no C#overflow, RubyOverflow, etc. even though at the beginning there was a fairly vocal outcry from users for them to do so.
cpeterso 16y ago
C# is also new "Visual Basic" for many internal corporate development projects.

rquirk 16y ago

The results were downloadable from the website if you took part. I copied the "other" column from the .xls file and here's a sort | uniq -c | head -21 of that table. 2188 people didn't mention other languages. 2188 55 Objective-C 40 Delphi 36 Java 24 VB.NET 19 VB 16 Haskell 14 vb.net 13 Objective C 12 Scala 11 ColdFusion 10 VB.Net 10 ActionScript 9 HTML 8 R 6 Lua 6 F# 5 vb 5 PowerShell 5 objective-c 5 Groovy There were a lot of "objective-c and some comment", so objective-c is even more popular. Other languages in there included: ocaml, assembly, klingon, tcl, fortran, COBOL, and quite a few matlabs. Here's the text file of that column for you to see for yourself http://pastebin.com/wMZUBMub http://pastebin.com/wMZUBMub