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I enjoy looking over the 2D chart of programming language popularity, but the chart raises some questions: -- How are there more Roff projects on GitHub than t

by todd8 3y ago

I enjoy looking over the 2D chart of programming language popularity, but the chart raises some questions: -- How are there more Roff projects on GitHub than there are projects in Julia or Haskell or Perl? I haven't thought about Roff for decades. -- Why are Zig and Nim so far apart on the chart? -- What circumstances are putting some languages above the diagonal while others are below it? Go and Rust are below the diagonal while R, Processing, Matlab, Scheme and Racket are above the diagonal?

wahern 3y ago
> How are there more Roff projects on GitHub than there are projects in Julia or Haskell or Perl? Presuming it encompasses nroff and troff, manual pages and other documentation, combined with forking of such projects? Even Perl has a roff file: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/cpan/podlators/t/data/man/encoding.roff https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/cpan/podlators/t/da...
bradrn 3y ago
> How are there more Roff projects on GitHub than there are projects in Julia or Haskell or Perl? I haven't thought about Roff for decades. Manpages, I’d assume. > Why are Zig and Nim so far apart on the chart? Nim has been around a lot longer, so I’m not surprised it’s more popular on both axes. > What circumstances are putting some languages above the diagonal while others are below it? I seem to recall them saying that the languages below the diagonal tend to be more widely used for personal projects (lots of GitHub projects), whereas the ones above the diagonal are used more for professional projects (lots of StackOverflow questions). Can’t find it in this article though… maybe this was mentioned a previous edition of the rankings.
pornel 3y ago
Roff is used for man pages. Its popularity may be a quirk of GitHub's language detection. Above the line are languages more asked about on SO than used on GitHub. The line is not meaningful by itself, it's just a juxtaposition of two data sources.
soegaard 3y ago
> What circumstances are putting some languages above the diagonal while others are below it? Go and Rust are below the diagonal while R, Processing, Matlab, Scheme and Racket are above the diagonal? People subscribe to tags on StackOverflow. My personal guess is that the communities of small tags (in terms of questions asked) are friendlier than the communities of larger tags. If you check a large tag such as the one from Swift, you will see that there are almost no upvotes - even if some questions get a checkmark. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/swift https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/swift

by todd8 3y ago

wahern 3y ago

> How are there more Roff projects on GitHub than there are projects in Julia or Haskell or Perl? Presuming it encompasses nroff and troff, manual pages and other documentation, combined with forking of such projects? Even Perl has a roff file: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/cpan/podlators/t/data/man/encoding.roff https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/cpan/podlators/t/da...

bradrn 3y ago

> How are there more Roff projects on GitHub than there are projects in Julia or Haskell or Perl? I haven't thought about Roff for decades. Manpages, I’d assume. > Why are Zig and Nim so far apart on the chart? Nim has been around a lot longer, so I’m not surprised it’s more popular on both axes. > What circumstances are putting some languages above the diagonal while others are below it? I seem to recall them saying that the languages below the diagonal tend to be more widely used for personal projects (lots of GitHub projects), whereas the ones above the diagonal are used more for professional projects (lots of StackOverflow questions). Can’t find it in this article though… maybe this was mentioned a previous edition of the rankings.

pornel 3y ago

Roff is used for man pages. Its popularity may be a quirk of GitHub's language detection. Above the line are languages more asked about on SO than used on GitHub. The line is not meaningful by itself, it's just a juxtaposition of two data sources.

soegaard 3y ago

> What circumstances are putting some languages above the diagonal while others are below it? Go and Rust are below the diagonal while R, Processing, Matlab, Scheme and Racket are above the diagonal? People subscribe to tags on StackOverflow. My personal guess is that the communities of small tags (in terms of questions asked) are friendlier than the communities of larger tags. If you check a large tag such as the one from Swift, you will see that there are almost no upvotes - even if some questions get a checkmark. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/swift https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/swift