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Actually, searches and SO questions would correlate with languages that are harder/less intuitive, rather than necessarily popular. It's like Distrowatch with L
by toyg 4y ago
Actually, searches and SO questions would correlate with languages that are harder/less intuitive, rather than necessarily popular. It's like Distrowatch with Linux, which favours "flavour of the day" distributions people are looking for, rather than the well-established ones that actually dominate deployments - because nobody needs to search for those.
Developer surveys are good but they typically self-select by audience. JetBrains surveys will over-represent core JB audiences (e.g. Java developers), SO other constituencies (newbies, MS...), etc etc.
- nindalf 4y agoRight, which is why I said they're proxies for popularity. We don't actually know what people are running on their computers so we use these proxies. They're not perfect, but they're a lot better than number of stars on the Github repo (TFA) or number of Google results (Tiobe). I also realise that StackOverflow has a bias towards newbies but that's not a bad thing. It just means that it's a forward looking prediction. The newbies of today are the grizzled veterans of 2030.
- hombre_fatal 4y ago> SO questions would correlate with languages that are harder/less intuitive, rather than necessarily popular People repeat this a lot because it sounds reasonable, but I don't see why it has to be the case. I would expect popularity to still dominate the SO question signal even if a handful of experts aren't asking questions on SO because they can RTFM. Newcomers to a language seem to ask a lot of questions no matter what, so bad SO signal seems to mean decreasing popularity. Also, the biggest questions on SO are super basic questions that not even the most intuitive, best documented language can escape. I don't see good evidence for the claim.