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No the author didn't read the methodology of the Stack Overflow Survey nor did they notice they can get the historical CSV of the survey going back to 2011 [1]

No the author didn't read the methodology of the Stack Overflow Survey nor did they notice they can get the historical CSV of the survey going back to 2011 [1] which literally tells the number of respondents per language (as-in how popular it is; no secondary population from TIBOE needed). Nor do they seem to understand (unlike you who does understand) that Loved and Dreaded have very specific meanings. They did shoddy work and I'm calling them out on it. They very easily could've tried to use the past (then) 9 years of data to show that as a language gets more popular it became less loved; but they didn't. The question of "If Java and Ruby appeared today, without piles of old rails apps and old enterprise Java applications to maintain, would they still be dreaded or would they be more likely to show up on the loved list?" is answered. It's a no. For 2020, Ruby was 4.5% and Java was 8.8% of developer's "Wanted" languages while Go (17.9%), Rust (14.6%), TypeScript (17.0%), Python (30.0% !!). Sure a lot of people would like Ruby and Java (there already are actually a lot of them) but when you're not at the top of the Wanted it's going to be very hard to get to the top of Loved. [1]: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/ https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/

adamgordonbell 3y ago
> but when you're not at the top of the Wanted it's going to be very hard to get to the top of Loved. Loved is based on people who use it. Wanted based on wanting to use it. They are separate.
ghayes 3y ago
I surmise that love or hate for a language is closely coupled with its stdlib. My favorite languages (Elixir, Rust) have some of the best standard libraries (and even, Go, for instance, includes JSON encoding and decoding in its own). This shields developers from code bases that need to constantly reinvent the wheel or pull in many dependencies for simple tasks. JavaScript is on the cusp here with a bad standard lib that has improved (in some ways) over the last 15 years.

adamgordonbell 3y ago

> but when you're not at the top of the Wanted it's going to be very hard to get to the top of Loved. Loved is based on people who use it. Wanted based on wanting to use it. They are separate.

ghayes 3y ago

I surmise that love or hate for a language is closely coupled with its stdlib. My favorite languages (Elixir, Rust) have some of the best standard libraries (and even, Go, for instance, includes JSON encoding and decoding in its own). This shields developers from code bases that need to constantly reinvent the wheel or pull in many dependencies for simple tasks. JavaScript is on the cusp here with a bad standard lib that has improved (in some ways) over the last 15 years.