7 ms·

Programming language popularity

63 points by alexk 18y ago

jerryji 18y ago
Where's HN and Twitter? :)
- jrockway 18y ago
  And github? They even give you the stats: http://github.com/languages http://github.com/languages (Interestingly, the stats are pretty easy to change. Perl was 2%, then Yuval Kogman and I moved our repositories there, and got it up to 3%. We advertised heavily on IRC, and now it is at 6%. Tripling the amount of code on github in a few weeks is certainly a sign that Perl is not dead. It's also interesting to consider that Yuval and I are 1% of the open source community ;)
  - davidw 18y ago
    github is too new and too unstable in terms of numbers, so far. Last I checked (a few months ago), Ruby was the most popular language according to github, which doesn't jive with any of the other data sources (or my own gut instincts). I've been keeping an eye on it, though. Stackoverflow is another one that's interesting, but currently has too much bias. Twitter... hrm. Yeah, might add that in the talk section. HN... I'd feel kind of bad about having an influence on the numbers myself;-)
hendler 18y ago
Would like to see this in relation to time. A timeline with markers like "Rails release", or Google App engine/Python. Normalized results are good though. At first I just read Google - Visual Basic, D and Delphi all being just a tad more popular than Ruby. Also thought Haskell would be higher - even if only because of one day at HN.
- Batsu 18y ago
  I agree. If it's at all possible to do this, it would be interesting to see when a language generates buzz and why. We could end up with something like finance.google.com for programming languages :)
- chancho 18y ago
  http://langpop.com/timeline.html http://langpop.com/timeline.html
  - hendler 18y ago
    Nice. Thanks for posting that.
Emore 18y ago
I'm missing Objective-C. Fairly sure it should be top 20 considering the overall good quality -- and quantity -- of Mac apps.
- potatolicious 18y ago
  Objective-C (and Cocoa) is notoriously under-documented. Much of what you do in Mac software development is tribal knowledge, which honestly sucks. Sites like CocoaDev try to maintain some semblance of a knowledge base, but it's still woefully inadequate. Apple refuses to publish code snippets, and their API docs consist of little more than what you would learn from the header files. Mac development is a pain in the ass, even though I like Objective-C as a language :)
  - boucher 18y ago
    I can't really say I agree with you. There are a lot of good books on the subject, there are a lot of great tutorial sites (free) on the web (look at scott stevenson's work, or cocoa is my girlfriend, or CocoaDev). The mailing lists are pretty heavily trafficked, as is the #macdev irc channel (if not always entirely helpful). The API documentation is better than most development environments I've worked with. Admittedly, Apple's secrecy problem gets in the way of publicly acknowledging bugs, missing features, or planned upcoming features. These things can be frustrating. Apple publishes a large selection of sample code though. In fact, they ship a lot of it with the developer tools themselves (plus all the docs), so you don't always have to go looking through the website. iPhone development is undeniably worse right now. I imagine this will change over time, but I agree their is a lot of work to be done on that front.
- davidw 18y ago
  There's a Google group where people can make suggestions for additions to the site. Objective C is probably a sensible one to include, at this point, though.
gabrielroth 18y ago
Odd data point: PHP is well-represented everywhere except Lamda the Ultimate (no surprise there) and ... Amazon. Why are there so few books on PHP when it's so well represented in Craigslist job postings? My best guess is that books are a really lagging indicator, because books stay in Amazon's database for so long: there's no way for PHP, Python, and Ruby, or even Perl, to come close to catching up with C and Java, given the large number of C and Java books published before those languages were even invented.
- chancho 18y ago
  Perl is older than Java.
  - lunchbox 18y ago
    Python is older than Java as well.
    - davidw 18y ago
      And so is Tcl for that matter.
- Scriptor 18y ago
  Actually, I feel that at some point in the past the market for PHP books was saturated. Until perhaps PHP 6 comes along, there is little need for new books. Additionally, the way many PHP programmers usually start is with online tuts and docs.
scottdw2 18y ago
I wouldn't put too much stock in those numbers. To start with, they are not measuring actual programing language usage. If you want to know which languages people are using, the only way to really do it is to do a simple random survey and ask them. What these statistics do is go to specific communities and attempt to measure which languages those communities use. Using those numbers to measure language popularity in the population at large makes the assumption that those communities are representative of the population at large. That's a faulty assumption to make. Do you, for example, think that Slashdot has a large segment of the "Excel VBA Macro Developer" market posting to it? Probably not. There are other sites, like Stack Overflow, that show a 2:1 preference for C# over Java. Does that mean there are 2x as many C# programmers as Java programmers? No. It just means that more posts on Stack Overflow are about C# than about Java. Information about the number of unique books written about a language at a particular store does not imply anything about popularity. If you considered "unit sales", that might give you a measure of "popular book subjects", but not about language usage. For example, it could be possible that Java programmers buy more books on Java than C# programmers do on C#. Many of the C++ programmers I know have several books on C++. I don't think that means C++ has more users than, say, Windows batch scripts. The web site does say "these results are not scientific", but I don't think that's a strong enough statement. The "scientificness" has to do with how the data is collected, and how the results are reported. Even if they measured the same things using scientific means, the numbers still wouldn't imply what they claim them to imply. A better disclaimer might be "these results are not useful for making any decisions what so ever."
- chancho 18y ago
  The actual data being shown is very clearly explained. They aren't drawing any conclusions so I don't see what your problem is. There is a 'Normalized Comparison' graph but the weights are right there for anyone to adjust. The authors are very honest about what this data is and what it means. It's just interesting, nothing more. They don't claim or even imply any of the things you say they do.
  - scottdw2 18y ago
    The name of the site is "lang pop". When the page loads the title bar says "Programming Language Popularity". The content of the page states: "We have attempted to collect a variety of data about the relative popularity of programming languages, mostly out of curiousity." Those are claims that what they are measuring is a proxy for language popularity. My point is that those claims are not valid.
ilkhd2 18y ago
Good for knowing what is more marketable.
quizbiz 18y ago
What's a recommended way to get started with Ruby (on Rails)?
jules 18y ago
Does anyone know how many programmers are programming per language? I'm most interested in Ruby, Python, C#, Java, but any other language would do too. Very rough figures? Are there 10^4 C# programmers, 10^6?
Aron 18y ago
Another perspective: http://www.google.com/trends?q=c%2B%2B%2C+paris+hilton&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 http://www.google.com/trends?q=c%2B%2B%2C+paris+hilton&c...
- DTrejo 18y ago
  So on a typical day, C++ is searched about as frequently as Paris Hilton. Interesting.
jsrfded 18y ago
This data is from 2004.
- alexk 18y ago
  Last data update: Sat Apr 04 23:17:06 +0200 2009
davidw 18y ago
Hey, thanks for posting that... Argh for posting it the one time I took a vacation in I don't know how long:-) (It's my site, BTW).
rms 18y ago
I was curious to see the numbers for Python vs. Ruby. I had expected Python to be more popular than shown, it seems to range from 2x Ruby to 20% more. I would think a regression for the changing popularity of each language would show Ruby passing Python at some point, does anyone think that will actually happen? My favorite argument for Python over Ruby was always that Python is more popular but it seems like that will become less true over time.
bf 18y ago
I can has LOLCODE?

63 points by alexk 18y ago

jerryji 18y ago

Where's HN and Twitter? :)

jrockway 18y ago
And github? They even give you the stats: http://github.com/languages http://github.com/languages (Interestingly, the stats are pretty easy to change. Perl was 2%, then Yuval Kogman and I moved our repositories there, and got it up to 3%. We advertised heavily on IRC, and now it is at 6%. Tripling the amount of code on github in a few weeks is certainly a sign that Perl is not dead. It's also interesting to consider that Yuval and I are 1% of the open source community ;)
- davidw 18y ago
  github is too new and too unstable in terms of numbers, so far. Last I checked (a few months ago), Ruby was the most popular language according to github, which doesn't jive with any of the other data sources (or my own gut instincts). I've been keeping an eye on it, though. Stackoverflow is another one that's interesting, but currently has too much bias. Twitter... hrm. Yeah, might add that in the talk section. HN... I'd feel kind of bad about having an influence on the numbers myself;-)

hendler 18y ago

Would like to see this in relation to time. A timeline with markers like "Rails release", or Google App engine/Python. Normalized results are good though. At first I just read Google - Visual Basic, D and Delphi all being just a tad more popular than Ruby. Also thought Haskell would be higher - even if only because of one day at HN.

Batsu 18y ago
I agree. If it's at all possible to do this, it would be interesting to see when a language generates buzz and why. We could end up with something like finance.google.com for programming languages :)
chancho 18y ago
http://langpop.com/timeline.html http://langpop.com/timeline.html
- hendler 18y ago
  Nice. Thanks for posting that.

Emore 18y ago

I'm missing Objective-C. Fairly sure it should be top 20 considering the overall good quality -- and quantity -- of Mac apps.

potatolicious 18y ago
Objective-C (and Cocoa) is notoriously under-documented. Much of what you do in Mac software development is tribal knowledge, which honestly sucks. Sites like CocoaDev try to maintain some semblance of a knowledge base, but it's still woefully inadequate. Apple refuses to publish code snippets, and their API docs consist of little more than what you would learn from the header files. Mac development is a pain in the ass, even though I like Objective-C as a language :)
- boucher 18y ago
  I can't really say I agree with you. There are a lot of good books on the subject, there are a lot of great tutorial sites (free) on the web (look at scott stevenson's work, or cocoa is my girlfriend, or CocoaDev). The mailing lists are pretty heavily trafficked, as is the #macdev irc channel (if not always entirely helpful). The API documentation is better than most development environments I've worked with. Admittedly, Apple's secrecy problem gets in the way of publicly acknowledging bugs, missing features, or planned upcoming features. These things can be frustrating. Apple publishes a large selection of sample code though. In fact, they ship a lot of it with the developer tools themselves (plus all the docs), so you don't always have to go looking through the website. iPhone development is undeniably worse right now. I imagine this will change over time, but I agree their is a lot of work to be done on that front.
davidw 18y ago
There's a Google group where people can make suggestions for additions to the site. Objective C is probably a sensible one to include, at this point, though.

gabrielroth 18y ago

Odd data point: PHP is well-represented everywhere except Lamda the Ultimate (no surprise there) and ... Amazon. Why are there so few books on PHP when it's so well represented in Craigslist job postings? My best guess is that books are a really lagging indicator, because books stay in Amazon's database for so long: there's no way for PHP, Python, and Ruby, or even Perl, to come close to catching up with C and Java, given the large number of C and Java books published before those languages were even invented.

chancho 18y ago
Perl is older than Java.
- lunchbox 18y ago
  Python is older than Java as well.
  - davidw 18y ago
    And so is Tcl for that matter.
Scriptor 18y ago
Actually, I feel that at some point in the past the market for PHP books was saturated. Until perhaps PHP 6 comes along, there is little need for new books. Additionally, the way many PHP programmers usually start is with online tuts and docs.

scottdw2 18y ago

I wouldn't put too much stock in those numbers. To start with, they are not measuring actual programing language usage. If you want to know which languages people are using, the only way to really do it is to do a simple random survey and ask them. What these statistics do is go to specific communities and attempt to measure which languages those communities use. Using those numbers to measure language popularity in the population at large makes the assumption that those communities are representative of the population at large. That's a faulty assumption to make. Do you, for example, think that Slashdot has a large segment of the "Excel VBA Macro Developer" market posting to it? Probably not. There are other sites, like Stack Overflow, that show a 2:1 preference for C# over Java. Does that mean there are 2x as many C# programmers as Java programmers? No. It just means that more posts on Stack Overflow are about C# than about Java. Information about the number of unique books written about a language at a particular store does not imply anything about popularity. If you considered "unit sales", that might give you a measure of "popular book subjects", but not about language usage. For example, it could be possible that Java programmers buy more books on Java than C# programmers do on C#. Many of the C++ programmers I know have several books on C++. I don't think that means C++ has more users than, say, Windows batch scripts. The web site does say "these results are not scientific", but I don't think that's a strong enough statement. The "scientificness" has to do with how the data is collected, and how the results are reported. Even if they measured the same things using scientific means, the numbers still wouldn't imply what they claim them to imply. A better disclaimer might be "these results are not useful for making any decisions what so ever."

chancho 18y ago
The actual data being shown is very clearly explained. They aren't drawing any conclusions so I don't see what your problem is. There is a 'Normalized Comparison' graph but the weights are right there for anyone to adjust. The authors are very honest about what this data is and what it means. It's just interesting, nothing more. They don't claim or even imply any of the things you say they do.
- scottdw2 18y ago
  The name of the site is "lang pop". When the page loads the title bar says "Programming Language Popularity". The content of the page states: "We have attempted to collect a variety of data about the relative popularity of programming languages, mostly out of curiousity." Those are claims that what they are measuring is a proxy for language popularity. My point is that those claims are not valid.

ilkhd2 18y ago

Good for knowing what is more marketable.

quizbiz 18y ago

What's a recommended way to get started with Ruby (on Rails)?

jules 18y ago

Does anyone know how many programmers are programming per language? I'm most interested in Ruby, Python, C#, Java, but any other language would do too. Very rough figures? Are there 10^4 C# programmers, 10^6?

Aron 18y ago

Another perspective: http://www.google.com/trends?q=c%2B%2B%2C+paris+hilton&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 http://www.google.com/trends?q=c%2B%2B%2C+paris+hilton&c...

DTrejo 18y ago
So on a typical day, C++ is searched about as frequently as Paris Hilton. Interesting.

jsrfded 18y ago

This data is from 2004.

alexk 18y ago
Last data update: Sat Apr 04 23:17:06 +0200 2009

davidw 18y ago

Hey, thanks for posting that... Argh for posting it the one time I took a vacation in I don't know how long:-) (It's my site, BTW).

rms 18y ago

I was curious to see the numbers for Python vs. Ruby. I had expected Python to be more popular than shown, it seems to range from 2x Ruby to 20% more. I would think a regression for the changing popularity of each language would show Ruby passing Python at some point, does anyone think that will actually happen? My favorite argument for Python over Ruby was always that Python is more popular but it seems like that will become less true over time.

bf 18y ago

I can has LOLCODE?