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I'd argue that StackOverflow shows what developers have the most questions about. This means that ranking is influenced by the amount of experience people have
by Deukhoofd 6y ago
I'd argue that StackOverflow shows what developers have the most questions about. This means that ranking is influenced by the amount of experience people have in the programming field, and leads to languages people commonly use as their first languages showing higher.
Besides that it's also influenced by how good the language is at explaining to the user what is going wrong. Clear error messages mean the user uses StackOverflow less, while arcane errors would mean they need to look for longer for the solution for their issue.
- imtringued 6y agoThe stackoverflow ranking we are talking about is the result of a survey. It's not influenced by amount of experience. Experienced developers don't get greater or lower weighting in that survey.
- wainstead 6y agoTrue, however, the primary problem with the SO survey is the participants are self-selected [1], not randomly sampled. (It's explained in the survey's methodology). What this means is we have no idea if the sample of programmers is representative of the worldwide programmer population. I'd argue that C# and other Microsoft languages are vastly under-represented in the SO survey, but we have no way of knowing if that's true. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-selection_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-selection_bias