7 ms·

Python grew fastest in web searches for 'tutorial' over the last 5 years

55 points by robert-zaremba 14y ago

Python is the language whose popularity is growing the fastest; it is already the second most popular in the US over decade.

msy 14y ago
I cannot take seriously a programming language popularity index that states that Javascript has become significantly less popular in the last year. I'm no fanboy but given the sheer weight of evidence from language activity on sites like github to the incredible number of jobs and recruiters desperate for skilled javascript developers it just does not add up. Sometimes a metric producing an unexpected outlier means you've found something interesting but usually it means your metric is broken or meaningless. Searches for the word tutorial sounds like an increasingly meaningless metric the world of sites like stackoverflow.
- wildranter 14y ago
  Popularity index sounds like something only Paris Hilton would take seriously.
- jayflux 14y ago
  I do agree. How can Javascript go down? It doesn't sound like it peaked last year at all.
  - hemancuso 14y ago
    I would argue that most people wanting to learn about javascript would be searching for "jQuery tutorial" or "nodejs tutorial" or "coffeescript tutorial" and not "javascript tutorial" Ruby and Javascript are made infinitely more popular because of projects like Rails, jQuery and node. A language like Python has no obvious framework helping drive adoption, so most information out there would be language-centric versus framework centric.
    - Jakob 14y ago
      In case you want to prove that: Coffescript and node.js change nothing in the equation but jQuery has as much searches as python and javascript respectively: http://www.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US#q=Python%20tutorial%2C%20Javascript%20Tutorial%2C%20coffeescript%20tutorial%2C%20nodejs%20tutorial%2C%20jquery%20tutorial&date=today%2012-m&cmpt=q http://www.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US#q=Python%20tut... Not including ember, backbone, angular, … Although it seems to me that the amount of tutorials on a language/framework do not have to have much in common with their popularity but with the beginner/pro-ratio. (under the assumption that mostly beginners write (for TIOBE) or read (for PYPL) tutorials)
- crusso 14y ago
  I cannot take seriously Really, how seriously does one need to take a language popularity index regardless of context?
  - ojr 14y ago
    Very good point, it also doesn't take into account that java and python are taught in colleges... If a student wanted more help on their python/java homework they will search python tutorial or java tutorial, the context is flawed
- asimjalis 14y ago
  I read through the analysis and it sounds off. It assumes that the number of people interested in JavaScript correlates with the number of searches for "javascript tutorial". This is incorrect. Many people search for "nodejs tutorial" or other variations. There might be a growth in "nodejs tutorial" searches at the expense of "javascript tutorial" searches. Similarly he does not see an increase in searches for "objective-c tutorial" and assumes the language is in decline. In reality there might be growth in terms like "ios tutorial" or "iphone sdk tutorial" which his metrics don't track.
- camus 14y ago
  What does popularity means anyway ? i do javascript all day, i hate it , i prefer python or C# , does that make it popular ? to me no.
PommeDeTerre 14y ago
These kind of popularity metrics really leave a sour taste in my mouth, regardless of the results. They're just so lacking in rigor of even the mildest degree that it's not even worth considering what they "discover". If any language is to be the "language of the decade", it ought to be C, and possibly C++. C or C++ still power basically every piece of truly important software, even today in 2013. The major operating system kernels, userlands, compilers, interpreters (including Python's main implementation!), network servers, and web browsers, are all written in one or both of them, for example. And that's not including the many embedded and industrial uses of C that aren't very visible at all. Until some other languages offer the same full-stack experience, and are actually used for writing critical, widely-used software, I don't think we can label any languages but C and C++ as the "language of the year", or "language of the decade", or even "language of the century" and beyond.
- reinhardt 14y ago
  While I agree that such metrics don't mean much, if anything at all, the notion that C/C++ should be "languages of the decade" because they "still power basically every piece of truly important software" doesn't make much sense. You might as well declare James Maxwell scientist of the decade because electricity still powers basically every piece of truly important equipment.
  - jacquesm 14y ago
    > You might as well declare James Maxwell scientist of the decade because electricity still powers basically every piece of truly important equipment. I'm all for it. Proponents of 'x' label 'x' the best thing in this decade is a lot less objective than your astute observation that electricity indeed still powers basically every piece of truly important equipment.
- betterunix 14y ago
  "C or C++ still power basically every piece of truly important software, even today in 2013" I doubt that; here, for example, is a truly important software system that is not written in C++ (and I suspect it would be a lot more dangerous if it had been): http://www.drdobbs.com/embedded-systems/ada-next-generation-air-traffic-control/199905389 http://www.drdobbs.com/embedded-systems/ada-next-generation-...
kator 14y ago
This is based on search engine results!? "The ratings are calculated by counting hits of the most popular search engines.... The number of hits determines the ratings of a language" -- http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/tpci_definition.htm http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/tpci_d... How could that indicate anything other then more pages found by the search engines. How do you know the bias of the engine over time isn't giving better results and the "search trend" ranking is causing the results to skew in one direction or another. I doubt search engine trends are a really accurate way to understand how much code is out there and what people are actually doing on a daily basis. Worse the search term is: +"<language> programming" More sites have "python programming" in them then "perl programming" and way more have "java programming" in them? This tells me nothing really. I could argue it tells me Java is hard as hell and you have to have lots of references to figure out how to do anything.. Or it tells me that Java has lots of "java programming" sites. Heck maybe it tells us that lots of people host javadocs and every single page says "Java Programming" <reference, docs etc.>. All that said I am actually enjoying python a lot and find myself writing more of my "you choose the language" projects in it. It feels like it will be more maintainable over time and I have the general feeling I can turn it over to others easier then a pile of Perl. I have to really write careful in Perl to make it readable by non-Perl heads. Python sort of forces that on you up-front. I'm still not a fan of having to use SPACES (COBOL anyone!!) to maintain blocks of code but I'm slowly getting used to it and using vim settings to make it easier etc.
- wubbfindel 14y ago
  As pk2200 said, this is PYPL. From what I read I believe, the search term used is: "<language> tutorial"
- pk2200 14y ago
  You're criticizing TIOBE, but the article is about PYPL, which uses a slightly different methodology (counting searches instead of results).
- asdfologist 14y ago
  No metric is perfect. If you think it's so bad, why not suggest a better one?
mrtbld 14y ago
The symmetric, "curious dance" between C and C# in 2009-2011 could be due to the fact that "#" is not a alphanumerical character. Some searches for "C#" may have been miscounted as searches for "C" in that period. (But that's just an hypothesis.)
revskill 14y ago
In our country, there are 80% developers are using .net/C#. They know how to use svn, cut CSS from Photoshop, code a website, do webform, but they don't know what JSON is, what GIT is, what Linux is, what a Message Queue, or Redis is. Hm, i don't know why .net is so popular. What .net can do, the Linux-based technologies can do.
wubbfindel 14y ago
After reading the FAQ I agree that using the term "<lang> tutorial" is better than "<lang> programming" - but couldn't the results for "<lang> tutorial" possible represent languages that are harder to grasp, rather than languages in popular use. Then again, if that was purely the case we'd be seeing "brainfk" all over the place. Just a thought.
trimbo 14y ago
> which language is taking advantage of PHP's decline Until you notice that Y-axis is logarithmic...
mitchi 14y ago
Guido van Rosseum left Google a while ago because he was annoyed they weren't using Python enough! Python is a nice language but I don't think it's the language of the decade. The langage of the decade is something that has been used from 2000 to 2012 a lot in entreprise and by individuals. Give that price to PHP for all it's worth. PHP was the language for the web for a very long time.... It was used to create facebook. It was a lot more influential than Python. Ask 50 persons in the street if they know what PHP is, then ask them if they know what Python is. I guarantee you that more people know of PHP. Predicting what will be the next language of the decade is more interesting. My bet is on Javascript for now.
- fauigerzigerk 14y ago
  My vote goes to JavaScript. Yes, PHP has grown a lot in the last 10 years, but it hasn't made a big difference. Faster and more complete JavaScript runtimes have actually changed the applications we use. Some things would simply not be possible without JavaScript.
  - camus 14y ago
    php is still the easiest thing to deploy on a server. unless you get loads of ecommerce cms or blog engines in node i wouldnt bet on it. on client there is not much choice anyway.
    - fauigerzigerk 14y ago
      I don't agree that PHP is that easy to deploy properly. I think it has that reputation only because most people using PHP never actually have to set up and configure a PHP server. But my point is about the client side. We don't have much of a choice between client side languages, but we do have a choice about how much we do on the client in the first place. That equation has changed quite dramatically over the past decade thanks to new JavaScript runtimes.
      - camus 14y ago
        > most people using PHP never actually have to set up and configure a PHP server. Most people using node just use a PAAS too.
asimjalis 14y ago
The analysis assumes that more searches for tutorials means the language is more popular where as it might just mean the language requires more tutorials to understand.
eliben 14y ago
At first I was about to dismiss this as TIOBE-like crap. But giving it a second thought, there is a deep difference in methodology. TIOBE - language is popular if "<language> tutorial" brings up lots of results on Google This page - language is popular if many people searched "<language> tutorial". It's not hard to see that the second one is a much more interesting metric. That said, it's still far from being enough to evaluate a language's popularity. On the other hand, it can be at least mildly correlated with the amount of people wanting to learn said language over the measured period of time.
xSwag 14y ago
According to Google Trends the search term "jquery" will soon overtake "javascript" in terms of popularity[1][2] [1]http://i.imgur.com/yqQ95.png http://i.imgur.com/yqQ95.png [2]http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=jquery,javascript http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=jquery,javascript
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
  That worries me. Some people can write "jQuery" but not proper JS code.
  - mrj 14y ago
    Uh, there's nothing improper about writing jQuery code.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
      I know. I'm just concerned about people that learn jQuery but not really JavaScript itself, just the bare minimum needed to use jQuery.
      - bryanh 14y ago
        I don't really think that is something to be worried about. Most of these people aren't coders by profession, they just want some little customizations to whatever form or theme they happen to be using. A good parallel for your comment would be: "I'm just concerned about people that learn VBA but not really Visual Basic itself, just the bare minimum needed to use Excel macros."
eli 14y ago
Extrapolating "popularity" for google search volume is a huge pet peeve. I see no reason to believe this data means anything.
TommyDANGerous 14y ago
If you look at USA and look at which state is the darkest for all of the search terms, California is the darkest for each.

Python is the language whose popularity is growing the fastest; it is already the second most popular in the US over decade.

msy 14y ago

I cannot take seriously a programming language popularity index that states that Javascript has become significantly less popular in the last year. I'm no fanboy but given the sheer weight of evidence from language activity on sites like github to the incredible number of jobs and recruiters desperate for skilled javascript developers it just does not add up. Sometimes a metric producing an unexpected outlier means you've found something interesting but usually it means your metric is broken or meaningless. Searches for the word tutorial sounds like an increasingly meaningless metric the world of sites like stackoverflow.

wildranter 14y ago
Popularity index sounds like something only Paris Hilton would take seriously.
jayflux 14y ago
I do agree. How can Javascript go down? It doesn't sound like it peaked last year at all.
- hemancuso 14y ago
  I would argue that most people wanting to learn about javascript would be searching for "jQuery tutorial" or "nodejs tutorial" or "coffeescript tutorial" and not "javascript tutorial" Ruby and Javascript are made infinitely more popular because of projects like Rails, jQuery and node. A language like Python has no obvious framework helping drive adoption, so most information out there would be language-centric versus framework centric.
  - Jakob 14y ago
    In case you want to prove that: Coffescript and node.js change nothing in the equation but jQuery has as much searches as python and javascript respectively: http://www.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US#q=Python%20tutorial%2C%20Javascript%20Tutorial%2C%20coffeescript%20tutorial%2C%20nodejs%20tutorial%2C%20jquery%20tutorial&date=today%2012-m&cmpt=q http://www.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US#q=Python%20tut... Not including ember, backbone, angular, … Although it seems to me that the amount of tutorials on a language/framework do not have to have much in common with their popularity but with the beginner/pro-ratio. (under the assumption that mostly beginners write (for TIOBE) or read (for PYPL) tutorials)
crusso 14y ago
I cannot take seriously Really, how seriously does one need to take a language popularity index regardless of context?
- ojr 14y ago
  Very good point, it also doesn't take into account that java and python are taught in colleges... If a student wanted more help on their python/java homework they will search python tutorial or java tutorial, the context is flawed
asimjalis 14y ago
I read through the analysis and it sounds off. It assumes that the number of people interested in JavaScript correlates with the number of searches for "javascript tutorial". This is incorrect. Many people search for "nodejs tutorial" or other variations. There might be a growth in "nodejs tutorial" searches at the expense of "javascript tutorial" searches. Similarly he does not see an increase in searches for "objective-c tutorial" and assumes the language is in decline. In reality there might be growth in terms like "ios tutorial" or "iphone sdk tutorial" which his metrics don't track.
camus 14y ago
What does popularity means anyway ? i do javascript all day, i hate it , i prefer python or C# , does that make it popular ? to me no.

PommeDeTerre 14y ago

These kind of popularity metrics really leave a sour taste in my mouth, regardless of the results. They're just so lacking in rigor of even the mildest degree that it's not even worth considering what they "discover". If any language is to be the "language of the decade", it ought to be C, and possibly C++. C or C++ still power basically every piece of truly important software, even today in 2013. The major operating system kernels, userlands, compilers, interpreters (including Python's main implementation!), network servers, and web browsers, are all written in one or both of them, for example. And that's not including the many embedded and industrial uses of C that aren't very visible at all. Until some other languages offer the same full-stack experience, and are actually used for writing critical, widely-used software, I don't think we can label any languages but C and C++ as the "language of the year", or "language of the decade", or even "language of the century" and beyond.

reinhardt 14y ago
While I agree that such metrics don't mean much, if anything at all, the notion that C/C++ should be "languages of the decade" because they "still power basically every piece of truly important software" doesn't make much sense. You might as well declare James Maxwell scientist of the decade because electricity still powers basically every piece of truly important equipment.
- jacquesm 14y ago
  > You might as well declare James Maxwell scientist of the decade because electricity still powers basically every piece of truly important equipment. I'm all for it. Proponents of 'x' label 'x' the best thing in this decade is a lot less objective than your astute observation that electricity indeed still powers basically every piece of truly important equipment.
betterunix 14y ago
"C or C++ still power basically every piece of truly important software, even today in 2013" I doubt that; here, for example, is a truly important software system that is not written in C++ (and I suspect it would be a lot more dangerous if it had been): http://www.drdobbs.com/embedded-systems/ada-next-generation-air-traffic-control/199905389 http://www.drdobbs.com/embedded-systems/ada-next-generation-...

kator 14y ago

This is based on search engine results!? "The ratings are calculated by counting hits of the most popular search engines.... The number of hits determines the ratings of a language" -- http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/tpci_definition.htm http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/tpci_d... How could that indicate anything other then more pages found by the search engines. How do you know the bias of the engine over time isn't giving better results and the "search trend" ranking is causing the results to skew in one direction or another. I doubt search engine trends are a really accurate way to understand how much code is out there and what people are actually doing on a daily basis. Worse the search term is: +"<language> programming" More sites have "python programming" in them then "perl programming" and way more have "java programming" in them? This tells me nothing really. I could argue it tells me Java is hard as hell and you have to have lots of references to figure out how to do anything.. Or it tells me that Java has lots of "java programming" sites. Heck maybe it tells us that lots of people host javadocs and every single page says "Java Programming" <reference, docs etc.>. All that said I am actually enjoying python a lot and find myself writing more of my "you choose the language" projects in it. It feels like it will be more maintainable over time and I have the general feeling I can turn it over to others easier then a pile of Perl. I have to really write careful in Perl to make it readable by non-Perl heads. Python sort of forces that on you up-front. I'm still not a fan of having to use SPACES (COBOL anyone!!) to maintain blocks of code but I'm slowly getting used to it and using vim settings to make it easier etc.

wubbfindel 14y ago
As pk2200 said, this is PYPL. From what I read I believe, the search term used is: "<language> tutorial"
pk2200 14y ago
You're criticizing TIOBE, but the article is about PYPL, which uses a slightly different methodology (counting searches instead of results).
asdfologist 14y ago
No metric is perfect. If you think it's so bad, why not suggest a better one?

mrtbld 14y ago

The symmetric, "curious dance" between C and C# in 2009-2011 could be due to the fact that "#" is not a alphanumerical character. Some searches for "C#" may have been miscounted as searches for "C" in that period. (But that's just an hypothesis.)

revskill 14y ago

In our country, there are 80% developers are using .net/C#. They know how to use svn, cut CSS from Photoshop, code a website, do webform, but they don't know what JSON is, what GIT is, what Linux is, what a Message Queue, or Redis is. Hm, i don't know why .net is so popular. What .net can do, the Linux-based technologies can do.

wubbfindel 14y ago

After reading the FAQ I agree that using the term "<lang> tutorial" is better than "<lang> programming" - but couldn't the results for "<lang> tutorial" possible represent languages that are harder to grasp, rather than languages in popular use. Then again, if that was purely the case we'd be seeing "brainfk" all over the place. Just a thought.

trimbo 14y ago

> which language is taking advantage of PHP's decline Until you notice that Y-axis is logarithmic...

mitchi 14y ago

Guido van Rosseum left Google a while ago because he was annoyed they weren't using Python enough! Python is a nice language but I don't think it's the language of the decade. The langage of the decade is something that has been used from 2000 to 2012 a lot in entreprise and by individuals. Give that price to PHP for all it's worth. PHP was the language for the web for a very long time.... It was used to create facebook. It was a lot more influential than Python. Ask 50 persons in the street if they know what PHP is, then ask them if they know what Python is. I guarantee you that more people know of PHP. Predicting what will be the next language of the decade is more interesting. My bet is on Javascript for now.

fauigerzigerk 14y ago
My vote goes to JavaScript. Yes, PHP has grown a lot in the last 10 years, but it hasn't made a big difference. Faster and more complete JavaScript runtimes have actually changed the applications we use. Some things would simply not be possible without JavaScript.
- camus 14y ago
  php is still the easiest thing to deploy on a server. unless you get loads of ecommerce cms or blog engines in node i wouldnt bet on it. on client there is not much choice anyway.
  - fauigerzigerk 14y ago
    I don't agree that PHP is that easy to deploy properly. I think it has that reputation only because most people using PHP never actually have to set up and configure a PHP server. But my point is about the client side. We don't have much of a choice between client side languages, but we do have a choice about how much we do on the client in the first place. That equation has changed quite dramatically over the past decade thanks to new JavaScript runtimes.
    - camus 14y ago
      > most people using PHP never actually have to set up and configure a PHP server. Most people using node just use a PAAS too.

asimjalis 14y ago

The analysis assumes that more searches for tutorials means the language is more popular where as it might just mean the language requires more tutorials to understand.

eliben 14y ago

At first I was about to dismiss this as TIOBE-like crap. But giving it a second thought, there is a deep difference in methodology. TIOBE - language is popular if "<language> tutorial" brings up lots of results on Google This page - language is popular if many people searched "<language> tutorial". It's not hard to see that the second one is a much more interesting metric. That said, it's still far from being enough to evaluate a language's popularity. On the other hand, it can be at least mildly correlated with the amount of people wanting to learn said language over the measured period of time.

xSwag 14y ago

According to Google Trends the search term "jquery" will soon overtake "javascript" in terms of popularity[1][2] [1]http://i.imgur.com/yqQ95.png http://i.imgur.com/yqQ95.png [2]http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=jquery,javascript http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=jquery,javascript

TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
That worries me. Some people can write "jQuery" but not proper JS code.
- mrj 14y ago
  Uh, there's nothing improper about writing jQuery code.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
    I know. I'm just concerned about people that learn jQuery but not really JavaScript itself, just the bare minimum needed to use jQuery.
    - bryanh 14y ago
      I don't really think that is something to be worried about. Most of these people aren't coders by profession, they just want some little customizations to whatever form or theme they happen to be using. A good parallel for your comment would be: "I'm just concerned about people that learn VBA but not really Visual Basic itself, just the bare minimum needed to use Excel macros."

eli 14y ago

Extrapolating "popularity" for google search volume is a huge pet peeve. I see no reason to believe this data means anything.

TommyDANGerous 14y ago

If you look at USA and look at which state is the darkest for all of the search terms, California is the darkest for each.