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Relative popularity of programming languages on Hacker News
- senko 4y agoSpoiler alert (if you've not been visiting HN lately): Rust wins, by a lot.
- irrational 4y ago> I'd have included Common Lisp as well, but there were no stories mentioning it explicitly in the title in the past year. Does this indicate that the results are only for a single year?
- senko 4y agoYes, the results are for the past year (submitted in the past 365 days).
- Xophmeister 4y agoIn much the same way you bundled Racket with Scheme, you could associate SBCL with Common Lisp.
- ivan_gammel 4y agoClickbait topic, which actually should have said „relative popularity of certain types of references to programming languages on HN“.
- andsoitis 4y ago> I'd have included Common Lisp as well, but there were no stories mentioning it explicitly in the title in the past year. When I google "https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=common+lisp+site%3Anews.ycombinator.com https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=common+..." one of the first results is "Tutorial Series to learn Common Lisp quickly" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31178737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31178737 - 5 months ago. There are more results within the last 12 months.
- senko 4y agoYeah I only counted the phrase "in $LANG", for two reasons: * fewer false positives * focuses on what people (share abot what they) *did* in/for those languages It's an imperfect study, for sure, but I think it's indicative.
- brudgers 4y agoAmong its indications is it indicates why "in Rust" is a meme.
- brudgers 4y agoHere is the last year's Common Lisp stories by Popularity https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=false&query=common%20lisp&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...
- compumike 4y agoThanks for compiling this! Would be nice to include Crystal https://crystal-lang.org/ https://crystal-lang.org/ but I see that it may be harder to search for than the others. On the first page of results for https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=crystal&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... only 12 out of 30 results are actually referencing the programming language...
- adgjlsfhk1 4y agoJulia which is missing ties for 7th in articles, and ranks 5th in comments.
- sundarurfriend 4y agoJulia is in 13th place for [articles], and 9th for [comments], which OP also confirms above (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33191448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33191448). The actual numbers posted by OP are somehow different from the ones Algolia returns, but the ranking is the same in either case. [articles]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22in%20julia%22&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru... [comments]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22in%20julia%22&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
- baby 4y agoNo ocaml. Oh well
- senko 4y agoUh, I forgot to include OCaml and Julia. Sorry, I have no excuse. Here's how they stack up (just added both of them to the list of languages and reran it): By number of stories: 13. Julia (35 stories), 18. OCaml (13 stories) By number of comments: 9. Julia (498 comments), 19. OCaml (82 comments) By points: 9. Julia (1542 points), 15. OCaml (503 points) I link to the Python script I used to generate this, so if you want to experiment with different date range or other languages/search terms, feel free to explore! (I do think Algolia API has some limits on the number of results tho so might not work out of the box for much longer time periods)
- yodsanklai 4y ago> 15. OCaml (503 points) I expected OCaml to rank much higher as it's often in the top stories. I must be biased.
- senko 4y agoI think the fact that it's lower on the number of posts indicates that there's less content about it, but people are more engaged (and posts more popular) when there is a story involving it. Also, as other commenters noted, this doesn't catch all stories (just the ones with a specific phrase) to minimize false positives. Although for OCaml, the false positives would be pretty rare.
- Jhsto 4y agoCan you also check APL?
- cestith 4y agoPerl is 8 stories. I haven't looked at the other metrics.
- sundarurfriend 4y ago
- staticelf 4y agoI mean it's not strange that Rust wins since a lot of new cool stuff is made available due to a lot of advancements in wasm and the Rust tooling for that.
- vippy 4y agoScala devs are too busy wondering about free monads and F[Request[F] => Response[F]]. I am very pleased by http4s, Doobie, ScalaJS, and the whole ecosystem, really: https://http4s.org https://http4s.org
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rob74 4y agoHmmm... if this really just looks for "... in [X]" titles, it misses a lot of posts. E.g. today's "New ScyllaDB Go Driver: Faster Than GoCQL and Its Rust Counterpart" is about both Go (mostly) and Rust, but would be ignored. Same for "Prusti: Static Analyzer for Rust". Plus, some people just love to use "Golang" instead of "Go"...
- senko 4y agoIt's naive enough that "in Go" would match "in Golang", so we got that covered :) Yeah, it does miss a lot - it'd be much harder to count all relevant stories and remove false positives. But I believe it probably misses out on all languages equally, so it probably evens out. Here's the script, btw: https://gist.github.com/senko/b031f61f61d89f96e165659d3f022784 https://gist.github.com/senko/b031f61f61d89f96e165659d3f0227...
- bakugo 4y agoNo surprise here, Rust users are physically incapable of going 10 seconds without mentioning that they use Rust.
- lowbloodsugar 4y agoApparently not just Rust users but people who want to complain about it. Well done for keeping up Rusts numbers.
- cercatrova 4y agoI've seen more complaining about Rust and its users on HN than I've actually seen Rust users.
- pdimitar 4y agoPeople who get stuff done and are successfully using a technology rarely go around advocating for it. Point being, Rust might be even more popular than what this post suggests. But then again that could go for any other language. Apart from Rust I also work with Elixir a lot and I know that most of its devs are not at all vocal; they're too busy being successful and don't need external validation -- they know the benefits of the tech and are using it to their full advantage. I know that I do that, and I know others. Both with Elixir and Rust.
- necovek 4y agoYou mentioned Elixir (in a thread about Rust) and Rust a fair number of times to consider yourself "not at all vocal", so perhaps you are not a case in your point :)
- pdimitar 4y agoThe fact that I am mentioning the languages every now and then is not the same thing as constantly advocating for them. Nuance, please. There is not only the 0% and the 100%.
- AuthorizedCust 4y agoR is missing, and it comes up here.
- cestith 4y agoA great language to do this sort of data gathering with probably, too.
- efficax 4y agopoor scala, you deserve better
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ss48 4y agoOne thing to keep in mind is that sometimes the programming language is tied more to a framework that gets more articles. Example would be Dart essentially being synonymous with Flutter at this point: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=flutter https://hn.algolia.com/?q=flutter Another, Ruby and Rails Framework, C# and .NET .
- smt88 4y ago.NET isn't similar because it can be used from C#, C++, F#, and VisualBasic as well. Obviously C# is by far the most common, but F# is disproportionately over-discussed on HN compared to its usage, and C# is disproportionately under-discussed.
- rjbwork 4y agoI don't even think RoR is analogous to C# and .NET. It's like saying RoR is analogous to Java and the JVM. RoR is more analogous to ASP.NET and Spring, or similar. Also, C# is used in Unity, for desktop apps, for console apps, for cloud processing, big data processing (especially in Azure), etc. Same goes for Java with Android and the entire Apache big data ecosystem.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Tozen 4y agoI agree with the sentiment of Rust possibly being more promoted by corporate interests and their converted evangelists, who may also be smearing or trolling other languages. Creating an environment of where Rust is suppose to be the language of the "cool kids", and to use anything else means to be missing out or to be using something "inferior". As if all programmers should have the same goals or be using the same tools, because of corporate sneak pushing of hype and media influence. Don't get me wrong, there are some good things about Rust. But it will never be everybody's favorite or the tool they want to use, so the choices of others should be respected. There is plenty of room for other languages to share the spotlight.
- yrgulation 4y agoThis shows rust being the most promoted language on HN, and not necessarily popular among its readership. I think js and python are likely to be more popular but less promoted.
- chaxor 4y agoYeah, Julia probably has a similar number of users as Rust - they just don't inject it into every breath they exhale like Rust users do.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoNot saying you're wrong, but... do you have any source for saying that Julia has as many users as Rust?
- williamstein 4y agoOn TIOBE, Julia (27) and Rust (20) are relatively close right now, and TIOBE might have some correlation to number of users. https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
- cutler 4y agoTIOBE's methodology is a joke. I'm surprised it gets a mention on a forum like HN which tends to attract the sharpest minds in the industry.
- pittmajp 4y agoWe sure are all great on here aren’t we? Plaudits to everyone involved.
- Tozen 4y agoIf you look at the IEEE top programming language list, it is still close. Believe it's Rust ranked #20 to Julia's rank of #28 (if my count is correct). https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages-2022 https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages-2022 And if you compare the IEEE to the TIOBE list, there appears to be a high degree of correlation. I think part of the criticism against TIOBE, is when people's favorite is not doing as well as they would like or a language they don't like is doing better than they expected.
- makz 4y agoThe results for Clojure surprise me, I remember around 2015 there was a trend in which I saw like two or threes stories every week about Clojure.
- gist 4y agoThat could also be because a story about something tickles others to post other stories and then it snowballs. (Noting that I noticed the same about Clojure years before that and made a comment elsewhere that it was what HN cared about because it was a dialect of LISP which PG cared about (for lack of a better way to put it).
- cutler 4y agoSurprises me too given how much real innovation comes out of the Clojure community. Babashka and Clojure Dart are just two recent examples.
- jasfi 4y agoToo bad Nim's not on the list.
- stephc_int13 4y agoNot seeing Jai or Odin is a bit sad, but at the same time relatively accurate because their communities are much smaller and for the most part Zig is eating their lunch.
- chubot 4y agoI thought Jai was dead since there’s no code and very little info other than video about it But apparently it is being used in closed beta
- stephc_int13 4y agoNot sure if the closed beta was a good idea for a programming language...
- Tozen 4y agoI think there is a bit more to it. Jai is still in beta and not publicly released yet, though lots of its good ideas have already been borrowed or influenced other languages. Still, Jonathan Blow is quite popular, and that might hook a lot of attention when an official release is done. Even if it seems like Zig is getting a lot of attention at the moment, it's not 1.0 either, and not to reach that point for years. Other languages like Odin, Vlang, and others that are flying under the radar might surprise us and may yet get more shine.
- kragen 4y agoI wonder where Perl, VB, assembly, SQL, R, Objective-C, and Matlab would end up on the list if they were included.
- stephc_int13 4y agoIt would be interesting to see the evolution of those numbers and ranking over time, maybe on a month or quarter granularity.
- dxbydt 4y agoscala is dead last. btw his script is 167 lines of clean well written python. i can rewrite that in 16 lines of scala using http4s and cats or whatever dsl is hot these days in scalaland. fwiw, probably that’s why scala is dead last :)
- incrudible 4y agoThe list of languages alone is more than 16 lines. So, unless you were going to write code that's hard to read and annoying to modify, you're going to need more than 16 lines. Given that you're a Scala programmer, that's probably indeed what you would set out to do. Fwiw, that's probably why Scala is dead last.
- melling 4y agoWhat happened to Scala? It used to have quite a following. Scala 3 was supposed to be a major improvement. No resurgence in enthusiasm after it shipped?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- BoxOfRain 4y agoI've recently applied to a Scala job that was specifically advertised to Java and Kotlin devs because it's hard to hire a Scala dev. I hope I get the role, I'm a sucker for an interesting programming language.
- incrudible 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_ti...
- leoh 4y agoCould be written with some BigQuery SQL using the open hacker news dataset
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y agoI wonder how much this is due to Rust being mentioned for every utility or library: In every language except Rust: "Show HN: Here is a cool web app I made" "Show HN: Here is a cool utility I made" "Show HN: Here is a cool library I made" Rust: "Show HN: Here is a cool web app I made in Rust" "Show HN: Here is a cool utility I made in Rust" "Show HN: Here is a cool library I made in Rust"
- toyg 4y agoThat's just because people love the language enough to evangelize. 20 years ago it would have been: "Show Slashdot: here's my cool desktop" vs "Show Slashdot: here's my cool desktop running Linux"
- nottorp 4y agoBut is the app any good? The fact that it's written in Rust doesn't provide information about that.
- CodeSgt 4y agoI think it might be one amongst many indirect signals for code quality. It's a hard language, so the author of the program likely has at least some amount of prior experience to build off of, and to build anything truly substantial with it you have to have a deeper understanding of how the code actually works than you do with some other languages. The language does do error handling, type validation, memory safety, and null checks really well. So, it's safe to assume that the app may have fewer bugs than it's counterpart written in, e.g., C or JS. It could still be shit, of course, but I imagine the average quality of an app written in rust would be at least a little higher than thay of apps written in many other languages.
- nottorp 4y agoI was thinking more of useful and easy to use than bug free...
- ncann 4y agoReminds me of the brilliant phrase "The Rust Evangelism Strikeforce"
- cestith 4y agoPerl is not included in the article. The past year in search on HN shows 8 articles. That's not going to bump Rust from the top, but it's the same as Lua, Lisp, and Erlang.
- gumby 4y agoI would have guessed this and was glad to see my thoughts confirmed. Nice bit of ego support. More seriously: it would be interesting* to do sentiment analysis on the articles and comments. A fair number of recent C++ articles on HN denigrate it, and any article about C++ inevitably generates a bunch of lazy anti-C++ comments. A post on "which languages do HN commenters like and dislike the most" would be quite eye-opening. I imagine rust would still be quite high, but perhaps the rankings would move a lot. * interesting, yes, but not interesting enough for me to bestir myself to do this. I guess I'm just lazy...and not in the programming sense!
- BTBurke 4y agoLet's just accept you can build just about anything in any language. When I see posts like "I built X in Rust," I just assume the process was so onerous that they had to impress others by saying they did it the hardest way possible. /s
- criddell 4y agoIf they specify it was made in Rust, then chances are that's what's interesting about the project. If somebody says they rewrote yes in $LANG, I might click through because even though the yes command isn't that interesting, the $LANG part may be.
- _hcuq 4y agoI love Tcl/Tk….
- nairboon 4y agoD is also missing.
- xiphias2 4y agoZig usually gets in the comments when other languages are mentioned because the author of the language is pushing it on HN. But when I look at what it really provides, linear typing is just not on the list, it can't compare to Rust's practical type system and maturity at this point.
- Tozen 4y agoAs to be expected. It's odd when people compare much older languages to younger ones, then crap on the younger ones for less features or ecosystem. Zig is not even 1.0, and is many years from reaching that point, according to their people.
- kristoff_it 4y ago> Zig usually gets in the comments when other languages are mentioned because the author of the language is pushing it on HN. Andrew doesn't really post all that much on HN, I think there are better explanations for the interest that HN has in Zig.
- mbrodersen 4y agoThe only thing I care about is number of jobs available for language X. Is there a list somewhere ranking languages by # jobs?