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heh yes I always wonder about these analyses -- is the # of questions on SO an actual correlate to popularity? Or is it the sign of an opaque or buggy language
by fat0wl 13y ago
heh yes I always wonder about these analyses -- is the # of questions on SO an actual correlate to popularity? Or is it the sign of an opaque or buggy language
It's funny (be warned, this is sortof flamebait i know) I left RoR to enter the Java world & since then it seems like RoR's popularity is still increasing on these metrics & it is very strong, even though the heyday of RoR seems to have passed. Many are critical of the new releases / constant breaking updates etc. and many viable MVC alternatives have emerged.
I think an interesting metric that is never really considered in these reviews would be "Number of SO Questions per user of the language" -- basically SO issues per capita. I think that may actually reveal some interesting facts about which dev platforms are most seamless to work on.
I appreciate the open source mantra & everything, still work on open source projects, but it is slightly worrying when I see these languages gaining so much traction yet having such a massive slew of banal issues ("trivial questions and answers" + things that are broken that shouldn't be, leading to workaround requests). I guess I have been converted to the evil Java empire (in fairness, I am diving into Clojure as well). JVM just seems more stable to me after dealing with everything in Rails breaking all the time & trying to balance dependencies ("I need to update this to use this, but then this will break. So I guess I need to update both gems plus Rails itself, but we aren't budgeted to do a bunch of integration testing right now, so... I guess we'll get that feature in 2 years or if it is ever backported" -- Java libs just seem a lot more robust to me, haven't yet faced an issue like this except for 1 or 2 workable IDE integration issues). OK that last bit really was a tangent.
- aidenn0 13y agoNumber of questions on SO correlates to number of people using the language that are likely to ask questions on SO. SO skews towards web-programmers and MS stack developers. That clearly affects a lot of rankings. Github similarly skews towards web-programmers (as a lot of the first users of it were RoR related) so you see the upper-right of this graph is mostly web related. Also, some langauges have their own preferred forums for support, with a lack of the critical mass of SO users. If you want an answer to a Common Lisp question, please visit #lisp on freenode; if you post to SO it will go unanswered for weeks; it's likely to get answered in a few hours on #lisp. [edit] And SO also skews towards homework questions.
- fat0wl 13y agoyes i see what you're saying. thank you for the intro to freenode! it's real-time (well, the time it takes for someone to return to computer & read your question) IRC q/a for Lisp? very cool. upload the logs & i bet it would be pretty parallel in function to SO. lol, i feel like their moderation usually only hurts the quality of posts if anything... if i ask a question that begs any thought or is open-ended in anyway it is immediately shutdown as an opinionated "asking for favorite library" question even if the functionality i'm looking for is clearly delineated -- which is what the real strength of a q/a community should be!! "I want to do x thing that's never been done before. Based on the existing libs that do tangentially related things or offer partial functionality, how should I proceed?" > "My RoR form is giving me an error does anyone know why?" (usually a typo or outdated syntax because older version docs are no longer available in the gem community)