10 ms·

What's Going on with Language Rankings?

132 points by coloneltcb 3y ago

memco 3y ago
Curious if the layoffs factor in to the decline in a statistically significant way? I wouldn’t expect that to account for all of the changes but maybe that accounts for some.
- jvalencia 3y ago
  This is an interesting point. If I were conducting layoffs, the seemingly extra things like open source contributions, may be the first to go.
  - runevault 3y ago
    Even if you aren't explicitly targeting people who's primary job is that some still likely get laid off. Sheer numbers alone could lead to real damage there.
- myth_drannon 3y ago
  Shopify as an example is heavily involved in open source (mostly Rails) and had large layoffs. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the contributors were gone dark.
- serial_dev 3y ago
  On the other hand, if I were laid off, I'd pretty quickly clean up my open source profile and get to creating some cool open source packages to showcase my work. Though my intuition tells me that the net effect of layoffs is still negative.
  - marcus_holmes 3y ago
    If you were coding because that's your passion, yeah. I'll bet a number of the people laid off (as happened after the dot-com crash) decided that this was the sign they should go and get a career they actually enjoyed.
kodablah 3y ago
> the data [...] showed a roughly 25% decline in pull requests in 1H2023 as compared to 2H2022 PRs [...] largely lacking an explanation May be obvious, but would rather know if you saw PRs-per-repo decline. Otherwise, I wonder if some very frequent-PR repos (automated or otherwise) had previously skewed numbers. Also curious if early numbers for this half can be obtained/compared.
- rnk 3y ago
  Github activity is an abstruse source of programming activity. I might do many github actions or few, separate from the actual use of the language. A lot of activity when learning is probably using online websites and online environments. People can move to other systems, use git on their own for instance. They need another datasource. There's another classic not reliable system, survey programmers to see what they are using.
  - rezonant 3y ago
    > A lot of activity when learning Oh, this made me connect some dots. At first I figured increase in GitHub activity during the pandemic was because people were home more and had more time to contribute to open source. But a lot of people took that time to learn software development. And a lot of courses will have you publish your learning projects to GitHub as a way to learn version control and processes (and also to promulgate awareness of, and analyze their course since there's often templates involved). Often this is just creating repos and pushing them, and since TFA directly looks at pull requests, perhaps this isn't it, unless these courses regularly include lessons on how to do a pull request (perhaps from yourself to your own repo). If that was a significant factor, it would make sense why the activity is down. > They need another datasource. Agreed here, the source is very imperfect.
- mdgrech23 3y ago
  This reminds me of the time managers tried to judge developer productivity based on lines of code changed. The person who ran the build script to generate the minified output for production kept winning. Mgmt was like why is this person generating 10x what you all do. #rockstardevelopers
karaterobot 3y ago
> There are languages that were under- or over-represented by using public GitHub repos; there are communities that were under- or over-represented by looking at discussions happening in Stack Overflow. I'm not sure I understand. Granted, they're never going to get perfect data about language rankings. But, why would AI assistants affect the rankings of language in a way that makes their methodology more unsound? They mention a drop-off in SO tag usage, and in Github pull requests: that's an indication of something, but is there any reason to believe it distorts the results so as to give undue prominence to one language more than another? Intuitively, I can't think of how. "Undue" is the keyword: even if the prominence changed as a result of AI language assistants, wouldn't that be an indication that people are just using those languages more, with the help of AI assistants? I'm really just wondering why, given the unavoidable squishiness of the methodology, the decrease in magnitude would bother them so much. They probably don't see their work as fundamentally hand-wavey, and maybe I just do, and that's the problem. I guess they're just investigating it, but the results seem to be more or less what you'd expect to conclude ab initio. I could be wrong, often am.
- bad_user 3y ago
  I think this trend favours unpopular languages. ChatGPT can only provide answers for programming languages and libraries that were included in its training. Granted, unpopular programming languages have online activity, too, but sample size matters.
- rezonant 3y ago
  I imagine they're just trying not to tell the wrong story just because of a tangential change in how developers use these tools, so taking some time to look closely and account for things and provide the necessary context for the report is sensible. I guess it's just taking longer than they expected due to the unexpected GitHub changes.
- stonemetal12 3y ago
  Lets say you are tracking lion populations. You watch a couple of watering holes and count the number of lions. From there you use stats to make estimates of total number of lions in the world. Suddenly your data shows a drop of 30% and is continuing to decline. Are lions going extinct, or did they find a new watering hole? If they found a new watering hole then you need to change your measuring locations to account for the shift. I don't think software development has started slowing down. So the data is indicating that the way they were measuring is becoming less useful than it was, and that they will need to find new data sources if they are going to continue. If that really is AI, maybe Copilot and friends will become an interesting source of data on programming language use.
marcosdumay 3y ago
Hum, I haven't seen that graph for Stack Overflow yet. So, it peaked in 2017, but it's widely accepted that the decline is caused by ChatGPT? That doesn't strike me as reasonable analysis.
- tgv 3y ago
  If attention shifts a bit to other languages (Nim? Zig? D? Clojure? Kotlin?), or if the answer is already in the multitude of answered questions, the activity will drop too. Or a multitude of not directly obvious other reasons.
cle 3y ago
> The advent and rise of AI-based code assistants are already impacting the data that populates RedMonk’s language rankings. Not only that, they are impacting the actual languages people use. Why use some new / esoteric language that an LLM doesn't know much about, when you can get the same job done much faster using a language that the LLM knows well and can debug? It's going to get increasingly difficult to bootstrap new languages unless they are available in LLMs.
- echelon 3y ago
  > Why use some new / esoteric language that an LLM doesn't know much about [...] Rust is wildly easy to generate (idiomatically so). I've been building in our Rust monorepo without LLM tools for years and just tried them out yesterday -- I was utterly blown away. Rust might become more popular with LLM accessibility.
  - stavros 3y ago
    I've been wanting to learn Rust for years but the learning curve was too steep, I think LLMs are what will finally do it for me.
    - lolinder 3y ago
      Copilot was key for me for learning Rust. The syntax is verbose and unique enough that it was hard to get into from nothing without constant syntax errors. Copilot eliminated that barrier: I could describe what I wanted in a comment and immediately see a (relatively) idiomatic way to do it in Rust.
  - NooneAtAll3 3y ago
    ...why did you decide to start talking about rust out of the blue? do you need help? are you getting paid?
    - evilduck 3y ago
      Because it was an anecdote directly relevant to the comment it replied to, which happened to be someone using Rust? Would you have replied the same way had they mentioned the ability to use LLMs to generate Python? Would you equally imply an accusation of a Python developer of being a shill for mentioning it?
goodroot 3y ago
The same is true for database rankings (db-engines). If entrants are not artificially inflating "organic" signals via fake content spam (Twitter/X), then the criteria themselves are losing their signal strength (StackOverflow/GitHub). The diffusion makes it increasingly difficult to understand which channels are important and which correlate to strength in the market. Unfortunately, these can be more than vanity metrics. Some VCs or financial markets may use these as methods towards valuation.
blueflow 3y ago
The decrease of Github activity might be caused by their 2FA rollout. Everything that does not have a 2FA workflow (like a git mirror bot) got locked out from non-public repositories this summer.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- janalsncm 3y ago
  Seems reasonable. If this is the case, we shouldn’t see a decline from summer (post lockout) to now. In fact we should see an uptick in the next period as more people get around to unlocking their accounts (or at least not a further decline).
  - blueflow 3y ago
    It was announced that 2FA will be forced for selected accounts (which seems to be everyone active) by January, so the doom is still impending.
  - countWSS 3y ago
    Lol. I'm not going to "unlock" my accounts. GIthub/Microsoft don't have a monopoly on hosting code.There are better alternatives that don't suddenly force their users to jump through hoops. Hope they introduce face-to-face verification via Zoom so the even the loyal MS-lemmings feel a sting.
- throwup238 3y ago
  Related discussion about the drop in new Github repos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37935288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37935288
- direwolf20 3y ago
  I deleted my Github account for this reason. Self-hosted Gitea now.
Havoc 3y ago
It's not just pollution on data side, but it is also messing with actual usage. I was making decent progress on Rust and enjoying that, but have reverted back to more python since that is the lingua franca of AI. So how do we rank that? Rust because of technical merit or python because real world? That's a distinct you won't catch via stack overflow scraping
araes 3y ago
Just to see what it looked like, plotted the last 5 seasons of top language from RedMonk on the StackExchange / Github plot. Mostly ad hoc circling of language groups to get an idea of movement patterns. Kept changing their chart scaling and naming every season... [1] [1] "RedMonk Programming Language Rankings, 2021-2023", https://i.imgur.com/MWhzGC2.jpg https://i.imgur.com/MWhzGC2.jpg. Individuals since the colors get messy. Q1, 2023: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/files/2023/05/lang.rank_.q123.wm_.png https://redmonk.com/sogrady/files/2023/05/lang.rank_.q123.wm... Q3, 2022: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/files/2022/10/lang.rank_.622.png https://redmonk.com/sogrady/files/2022/10/lang.rank_.622.png Q1, 2022: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/files/2022/03/lang-rank-0122-wm.png https://redmonk.com/sogrady/files/2022/03/lang-rank-0122-wm.... Q3, 2021: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/files/2021/08/lang.rank_.0621.png https://redmonk.com/sogrady/files/2021/08/lang.rank_.0621.pn... Q1, 2021: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/files/2021/03/lang.rank_.0121.wm_.png https://redmonk.com/sogrady/files/2021/03/lang.rank_.0121.wm...
- janalsncm 3y ago
  If I could make a friendly suggestion, I think the data would be a bit easier to interpret if it were a grouped bar chart (GH rank, SO rank) and sorted by one (or the sum of the reciprocals).
lacker 3y ago
This is especially tough for RedMonk's rankings because they typically evaluate languages on "lifetime summary" metrics like total number of tags on Stack Overflow, or total number of projects on GitHub. e.g.: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2023/05/16/language-rankings-1-23/ https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2023/05/16/language-rankings-1-2... If Stack Overflow becomes more and more a reflection of "historical behavior" rather than "modern behavior", this sort of metric will become a less useful way to judge modern developer usage.
galkk 3y ago
Idk, I don’t feel that languages need to be/can be ranked. Right now I don’t even believe that much on the right language for the job, but believe in “there was good founding engineer/team, they picked up what they were familiar with and were able to deliver”. People > language. When time will come, another army will rewrite in another language/microservice-size/whatevet
- persedes 3y ago
  The article is not about ranking the languages per se, but about the drop in activity on stackoverflow likely due to chatGPT and a similar drop in PRs for github.
serial_dev 3y ago
https://twitter.com/timsneath/status/1734108536987373910 https://twitter.com/timsneath/status/1734108536987373910 TIOBE > Does anyone honestly believe that TypeScript is half as popular as Prolog or D?
- mminer237 3y ago
  You're probably aware, but that's a totally different ranking. On RedMonk's last ranking, TypeScript was one of the most popular languages, D was maybe 55% as popular, and Prolog didn't even make the list.
- AaronFriel 3y ago
  RedMonk and many other language rankings have methodological issues when languages are very similar. Many people tag TypeScript questions as JavaScript, repositories with large amounts of JS checked in are considered JavaScript even if they have complete TypeScript typings (see: Webpack), and so-on. I think this is one of the strongest signals that TypeScript is the dominant way JavaScript is written: https://npmtrends.com/@types/react-vs-react https://npmtrends.com/@types/react-vs-react The type definitions for React are more popular than React itself. Why is that? Even users who aren't choosing to use using TypeScript are benefiting from their IDE installing typings on their behalf, at a rate large enough to exceed the CI/CD systems and users running "npm/yarn/pnpm install" and only installing "react". It's like this for other packages as well; but the sheer popularity of react makes the point well. Many, many developers are using TypeScript even if indirectly, it's what makes their IDE light up.
- mynameisnoone 3y ago
  Let me explirant/elucidate those who may not understand why TIOBE is a dumb signal: The primary "problem" programming language ranking lists solves are: 0. the amelioration of trepidation of the novice as to which tool in the toolbox to "select" without first building something by trial-and-error. 1. The businesses who don't want to know anything but wish to surf fashionable trends in business and technology. TS is a strict superset of JS. It probably doesn't get as much credit for being safer and superior to JS because it's routinely transpiled out of existence and doesn't offer language features on its own besides gradual, static typing. And there aren't many questions about it because its fairly self-explanatory. The biggest problem with TS is the Cambrian explosion of confusion of procedural configuration files (.ts and .js). Prolog is used in programming language courses to solve logic brain teasers, formal verification every now and then (although Coq, Isabelle, RedPRL, and Idris exist now) and some niches like TerminusDB and Watson. It was probably used once to solve a formal proof and then modeled by Erlang. It's one of those influential languages amongst language designers like ALGOL 68, Haskell, and LISP that weren't themselves popular. (You can thank ALGOL 68 for the Bourne shell family.) The other thing is programming language popularity peeing contests are rarely useful because what is practical is productivity and correctness at scale under the financial and effort constraints in reality for a given problem, team, and codebase. Plus, thundering herds of people just in it for the money tend to have resumes that all look the same and completely lack curiosity. Also, recruiters who follow popularity are the ones I can righteously tell to go hell for insulting me by saying things like "X isn't going anywhere" (In one case: X was Go, and t was 2011). While there is "safety in numbers", there are N ways to trim hairy cattle. Sometimes, easier and better ways come along that need to be tried. Curiosity and learning never go out of style except at shops that are dinosaurs marching to the tar pits. Shops that discourage learning in favor of ship-ship-ship yesterday, avoid bettering their employees, and are full of people who have no technical side-hobbies lack engineering craftspeople.
RyanShook 3y ago
I think 2024 is the year we see Python overtake JS in overall popularity.
- frou_dh 3y ago
  On the other hand, the significance of that diminishes quite a bit if it it's only the case when JS/TS are separated in the ranking.
- willsmith72 3y ago
  Why's that? I only see js/ts on a huge incline mostly because of backend, and making it easier to hire full stack devs (desirable in slow economies)
epolanski 3y ago
By the way number of questions on stackoverflow stopped decreasing many years before the advent of LLMs.. I think Chatgpt/Copilot merely accelerated something that was already known to be in a bad state due to the toxicity of the platform.
valis2400 3y ago
I love how they say "post-ChatGPT"
jeffbee 3y ago
I can definitely see why StackOverflow is suffering. Why would you ask questions there, when 98% of the time your question will be duped to an unrelated question or some overbearing fuckwit with half a million karma will undermine the premise of your question as though you don't know what you are doing? With chatbots you can query a free, compressed representation of StackOverflow, without the terrible attitude.
vaxman 3y ago
“Everyone is doing it” machine broken rWars/lWars were sprileg verboten in earlier versions of The Matrix. Now, with all the resources around to waste (WASTE!), such discord can be used to form (or manipulate) popular opinion and herd competitors towards doom (“and then you paid your people double cuz they did it in Rails”) If you don’t know what languages to use for your apps without reading a popularity survey, an exciting career awaits you in the field of marketing, customer relations, finance or golf caddy. https://youtu.be/za0nyYbp6is https://youtu.be/za0nyYbp6is

132 points by coloneltcb 3y ago

Curious if the layoffs factor in to the decline in a statistically significant way? I wouldn’t expect that to account for all of the changes but maybe that accounts for some.

jvalencia 3y ago
This is an interesting point. If I were conducting layoffs, the seemingly extra things like open source contributions, may be the first to go.
- runevault 3y ago
  Even if you aren't explicitly targeting people who's primary job is that some still likely get laid off. Sheer numbers alone could lead to real damage there.
myth_drannon 3y ago
Shopify as an example is heavily involved in open source (mostly Rails) and had large layoffs. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the contributors were gone dark.
serial_dev 3y ago
On the other hand, if I were laid off, I'd pretty quickly clean up my open source profile and get to creating some cool open source packages to showcase my work. Though my intuition tells me that the net effect of layoffs is still negative.
- marcus_holmes 3y ago
  If you were coding because that's your passion, yeah. I'll bet a number of the people laid off (as happened after the dot-com crash) decided that this was the sign they should go and get a career they actually enjoyed.

kodablah 3y ago

> the data [...] showed a roughly 25% decline in pull requests in 1H2023 as compared to 2H2022 PRs [...] largely lacking an explanation May be obvious, but would rather know if you saw PRs-per-repo decline. Otherwise, I wonder if some very frequent-PR repos (automated or otherwise) had previously skewed numbers. Also curious if early numbers for this half can be obtained/compared.

rnk 3y ago
Github activity is an abstruse source of programming activity. I might do many github actions or few, separate from the actual use of the language. A lot of activity when learning is probably using online websites and online environments. People can move to other systems, use git on their own for instance. They need another datasource. There's another classic not reliable system, survey programmers to see what they are using.
- rezonant 3y ago
  > A lot of activity when learning Oh, this made me connect some dots. At first I figured increase in GitHub activity during the pandemic was because people were home more and had more time to contribute to open source. But a lot of people took that time to learn software development. And a lot of courses will have you publish your learning projects to GitHub as a way to learn version control and processes (and also to promulgate awareness of, and analyze their course since there's often templates involved). Often this is just creating repos and pushing them, and since TFA directly looks at pull requests, perhaps this isn't it, unless these courses regularly include lessons on how to do a pull request (perhaps from yourself to your own repo). If that was a significant factor, it would make sense why the activity is down. > They need another datasource. Agreed here, the source is very imperfect.
mdgrech23 3y ago
This reminds me of the time managers tried to judge developer productivity based on lines of code changed. The person who ran the build script to generate the minified output for production kept winning. Mgmt was like why is this person generating 10x what you all do. #rockstardevelopers

karaterobot 3y ago

> There are languages that were under- or over-represented by using public GitHub repos; there are communities that were under- or over-represented by looking at discussions happening in Stack Overflow. I'm not sure I understand. Granted, they're never going to get perfect data about language rankings. But, why would AI assistants affect the rankings of language in a way that makes their methodology more unsound? They mention a drop-off in SO tag usage, and in Github pull requests: that's an indication of something, but is there any reason to believe it distorts the results so as to give undue prominence to one language more than another? Intuitively, I can't think of how. "Undue" is the keyword: even if the prominence changed as a result of AI language assistants, wouldn't that be an indication that people are just using those languages more, with the help of AI assistants? I'm really just wondering why, given the unavoidable squishiness of the methodology, the decrease in magnitude would bother them so much. They probably don't see their work as fundamentally hand-wavey, and maybe I just do, and that's the problem. I guess they're just investigating it, but the results seem to be more or less what you'd expect to conclude ab initio. I could be wrong, often am.

bad_user 3y ago
I think this trend favours unpopular languages. ChatGPT can only provide answers for programming languages and libraries that were included in its training. Granted, unpopular programming languages have online activity, too, but sample size matters.
rezonant 3y ago
I imagine they're just trying not to tell the wrong story just because of a tangential change in how developers use these tools, so taking some time to look closely and account for things and provide the necessary context for the report is sensible. I guess it's just taking longer than they expected due to the unexpected GitHub changes.
stonemetal12 3y ago
Lets say you are tracking lion populations. You watch a couple of watering holes and count the number of lions. From there you use stats to make estimates of total number of lions in the world. Suddenly your data shows a drop of 30% and is continuing to decline. Are lions going extinct, or did they find a new watering hole? If they found a new watering hole then you need to change your measuring locations to account for the shift. I don't think software development has started slowing down. So the data is indicating that the way they were measuring is becoming less useful than it was, and that they will need to find new data sources if they are going to continue. If that really is AI, maybe Copilot and friends will become an interesting source of data on programming language use.

marcosdumay 3y ago

Hum, I haven't seen that graph for Stack Overflow yet. So, it peaked in 2017, but it's widely accepted that the decline is caused by ChatGPT? That doesn't strike me as reasonable analysis.

tgv 3y ago
If attention shifts a bit to other languages (Nim? Zig? D? Clojure? Kotlin?), or if the answer is already in the multitude of answered questions, the activity will drop too. Or a multitude of not directly obvious other reasons.

cle 3y ago

> The advent and rise of AI-based code assistants are already impacting the data that populates RedMonk’s language rankings. Not only that, they are impacting the actual languages people use. Why use some new / esoteric language that an LLM doesn't know much about, when you can get the same job done much faster using a language that the LLM knows well and can debug? It's going to get increasingly difficult to bootstrap new languages unless they are available in LLMs.

echelon 3y ago
> Why use some new / esoteric language that an LLM doesn't know much about [...] Rust is wildly easy to generate (idiomatically so). I've been building in our Rust monorepo without LLM tools for years and just tried them out yesterday -- I was utterly blown away. Rust might become more popular with LLM accessibility.
- stavros 3y ago
  I've been wanting to learn Rust for years but the learning curve was too steep, I think LLMs are what will finally do it for me.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    Copilot was key for me for learning Rust. The syntax is verbose and unique enough that it was hard to get into from nothing without constant syntax errors. Copilot eliminated that barrier: I could describe what I wanted in a comment and immediately see a (relatively) idiomatic way to do it in Rust.
- NooneAtAll3 3y ago
  ...why did you decide to start talking about rust out of the blue? do you need help? are you getting paid?
  - evilduck 3y ago
    Because it was an anecdote directly relevant to the comment it replied to, which happened to be someone using Rust? Would you have replied the same way had they mentioned the ability to use LLMs to generate Python? Would you equally imply an accusation of a Python developer of being a shill for mentioning it?

goodroot 3y ago

The same is true for database rankings (db-engines). If entrants are not artificially inflating "organic" signals via fake content spam (Twitter/X), then the criteria themselves are losing their signal strength (StackOverflow/GitHub). The diffusion makes it increasingly difficult to understand which channels are important and which correlate to strength in the market. Unfortunately, these can be more than vanity metrics. Some VCs or financial markets may use these as methods towards valuation.

blueflow 3y ago

The decrease of Github activity might be caused by their 2FA rollout. Everything that does not have a 2FA workflow (like a git mirror bot) got locked out from non-public repositories this summer.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
janalsncm 3y ago
Seems reasonable. If this is the case, we shouldn’t see a decline from summer (post lockout) to now. In fact we should see an uptick in the next period as more people get around to unlocking their accounts (or at least not a further decline).
- blueflow 3y ago
  It was announced that 2FA will be forced for selected accounts (which seems to be everyone active) by January, so the doom is still impending.
- countWSS 3y ago
  Lol. I'm not going to "unlock" my accounts. GIthub/Microsoft don't have a monopoly on hosting code.There are better alternatives that don't suddenly force their users to jump through hoops. Hope they introduce face-to-face verification via Zoom so the even the loyal MS-lemmings feel a sting.
throwup238 3y ago
Related discussion about the drop in new Github repos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37935288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37935288
direwolf20 3y ago
I deleted my Github account for this reason. Self-hosted Gitea now.

Havoc 3y ago

It's not just pollution on data side, but it is also messing with actual usage. I was making decent progress on Rust and enjoying that, but have reverted back to more python since that is the lingua franca of AI. So how do we rank that? Rust because of technical merit or python because real world? That's a distinct you won't catch via stack overflow scraping

araes 3y ago

Just to see what it looked like, plotted the last 5 seasons of top language from RedMonk on the StackExchange / Github plot. Mostly ad hoc circling of language groups to get an idea of movement patterns. Kept changing their chart scaling and naming every season... [1] [1] "RedMonk Programming Language Rankings, 2021-2023", https://i.imgur.com/MWhzGC2.jpg https://i.imgur.com/MWhzGC2.jpg. Individuals since the colors get messy. Q1, 2023: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/files/2023/05/lang.rank_.q123.wm_.png https://redmonk.com/sogrady/files/2023/05/lang.rank_.q123.wm... Q3, 2022: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/files/2022/10/lang.rank_.622.png https://redmonk.com/sogrady/files/2022/10/lang.rank_.622.png Q1, 2022: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/files/2022/03/lang-rank-0122-wm.png https://redmonk.com/sogrady/files/2022/03/lang-rank-0122-wm.... Q3, 2021: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/files/2021/08/lang.rank_.0621.png https://redmonk.com/sogrady/files/2021/08/lang.rank_.0621.pn... Q1, 2021: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/files/2021/03/lang.rank_.0121.wm_.png https://redmonk.com/sogrady/files/2021/03/lang.rank_.0121.wm...

janalsncm 3y ago
If I could make a friendly suggestion, I think the data would be a bit easier to interpret if it were a grouped bar chart (GH rank, SO rank) and sorted by one (or the sum of the reciprocals).

lacker 3y ago

This is especially tough for RedMonk's rankings because they typically evaluate languages on "lifetime summary" metrics like total number of tags on Stack Overflow, or total number of projects on GitHub. e.g.: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2023/05/16/language-rankings-1-23/ https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2023/05/16/language-rankings-1-2... If Stack Overflow becomes more and more a reflection of "historical behavior" rather than "modern behavior", this sort of metric will become a less useful way to judge modern developer usage.

galkk 3y ago

Idk, I don’t feel that languages need to be/can be ranked. Right now I don’t even believe that much on the right language for the job, but believe in “there was good founding engineer/team, they picked up what they were familiar with and were able to deliver”. People > language. When time will come, another army will rewrite in another language/microservice-size/whatevet

persedes 3y ago
The article is not about ranking the languages per se, but about the drop in activity on stackoverflow likely due to chatGPT and a similar drop in PRs for github.

serial_dev 3y ago

https://twitter.com/timsneath/status/1734108536987373910 https://twitter.com/timsneath/status/1734108536987373910 TIOBE > Does anyone honestly believe that TypeScript is half as popular as Prolog or D?

mminer237 3y ago
You're probably aware, but that's a totally different ranking. On RedMonk's last ranking, TypeScript was one of the most popular languages, D was maybe 55% as popular, and Prolog didn't even make the list.
AaronFriel 3y ago
RedMonk and many other language rankings have methodological issues when languages are very similar. Many people tag TypeScript questions as JavaScript, repositories with large amounts of JS checked in are considered JavaScript even if they have complete TypeScript typings (see: Webpack), and so-on. I think this is one of the strongest signals that TypeScript is the dominant way JavaScript is written: https://npmtrends.com/@types/react-vs-react https://npmtrends.com/@types/react-vs-react The type definitions for React are more popular than React itself. Why is that? Even users who aren't choosing to use using TypeScript are benefiting from their IDE installing typings on their behalf, at a rate large enough to exceed the CI/CD systems and users running "npm/yarn/pnpm install" and only installing "react". It's like this for other packages as well; but the sheer popularity of react makes the point well. Many, many developers are using TypeScript even if indirectly, it's what makes their IDE light up.
mynameisnoone 3y ago
Let me explirant/elucidate those who may not understand why TIOBE is a dumb signal: The primary "problem" programming language ranking lists solves are: 0. the amelioration of trepidation of the novice as to which tool in the toolbox to "select" without first building something by trial-and-error. 1. The businesses who don't want to know anything but wish to surf fashionable trends in business and technology. TS is a strict superset of JS. It probably doesn't get as much credit for being safer and superior to JS because it's routinely transpiled out of existence and doesn't offer language features on its own besides gradual, static typing. And there aren't many questions about it because its fairly self-explanatory. The biggest problem with TS is the Cambrian explosion of confusion of procedural configuration files (.ts and .js). Prolog is used in programming language courses to solve logic brain teasers, formal verification every now and then (although Coq, Isabelle, RedPRL, and Idris exist now) and some niches like TerminusDB and Watson. It was probably used once to solve a formal proof and then modeled by Erlang. It's one of those influential languages amongst language designers like ALGOL 68, Haskell, and LISP that weren't themselves popular. (You can thank ALGOL 68 for the Bourne shell family.) The other thing is programming language popularity peeing contests are rarely useful because what is practical is productivity and correctness at scale under the financial and effort constraints in reality for a given problem, team, and codebase. Plus, thundering herds of people just in it for the money tend to have resumes that all look the same and completely lack curiosity. Also, recruiters who follow popularity are the ones I can righteously tell to go hell for insulting me by saying things like "X isn't going anywhere" (In one case: X was Go, and t was 2011). While there is "safety in numbers", there are N ways to trim hairy cattle. Sometimes, easier and better ways come along that need to be tried. Curiosity and learning never go out of style except at shops that are dinosaurs marching to the tar pits. Shops that discourage learning in favor of ship-ship-ship yesterday, avoid bettering their employees, and are full of people who have no technical side-hobbies lack engineering craftspeople.

RyanShook 3y ago

I think 2024 is the year we see Python overtake JS in overall popularity.

frou_dh 3y ago
On the other hand, the significance of that diminishes quite a bit if it it's only the case when JS/TS are separated in the ranking.
willsmith72 3y ago
Why's that? I only see js/ts on a huge incline mostly because of backend, and making it easier to hire full stack devs (desirable in slow economies)

epolanski 3y ago

By the way number of questions on stackoverflow stopped decreasing many years before the advent of LLMs.. I think Chatgpt/Copilot merely accelerated something that was already known to be in a bad state due to the toxicity of the platform.

valis2400 3y ago

I love how they say "post-ChatGPT"

jeffbee 3y ago

I can definitely see why StackOverflow is suffering. Why would you ask questions there, when 98% of the time your question will be duped to an unrelated question or some overbearing fuckwit with half a million karma will undermine the premise of your question as though you don't know what you are doing? With chatbots you can query a free, compressed representation of StackOverflow, without the terrible attitude.

vaxman 3y ago

“Everyone is doing it” machine broken rWars/lWars were sprileg verboten in earlier versions of The Matrix. Now, with all the resources around to waste (WASTE!), such discord can be used to form (or manipulate) popular opinion and herd competitors towards doom (“and then you paid your people double cuz they did it in Rails”) If you don’t know what languages to use for your apps without reading a popularity survey, an exciting career awaits you in the field of marketing, customer relations, finance or golf caddy. https://youtu.be/za0nyYbp6is https://youtu.be/za0nyYbp6is