tag:dreamwidth.org,2013-12-31:2137567 Steven D'Aprano Steven D'Aprano 2015-02-22T14:19:15Z tag:dreamwidth.org,2013-12-31:2137567:2873 2014-04-21T05:33:14Z 2014-04-21T05:33:14Z public 0 Recently, I wrote about <a href="http://import-that.dreamwidth.org/1388.html">the various ways of measuring language popularity</a>, and I thought I'd add another two.<br /><br /><a href="http://trendyskills.com/">TrendySkills</a> measures popularity of IT technologies (not just languages) by extracting information from job advertisements. It's currently showing Python at number 9, just ahead of C and just behind HTML5. Despite the name, the site doesn't appear to measure <em>trends</em> as such (what technologies are becoming more popular or less popular), but only snapshots of current popularity. It also mixes data collected from <a href="http://trendyskills.com/about">numerous countries</a>, including the USA, Spain and Sweden. I don't think the job market is truly world-wide, not even in IT, so that seems a weakness to me: just because a technology is popular in one country doesn't mean it will be equally popular in another.<br /><br /><a href="http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2014/01/22/language-rankings-1-14/">RedMonk</a> periodically posts a graph of language popularity based on GitHub and StackOverflow. They find Python in position 5, sandwiched between C# and C++.<br /><br />However you measure it, there's no doubt that Python is one of the most popular and influential languages around.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=import_that&ditemid=2873" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments tag:dreamwidth.org,2013-12-31:2137567:1388 2014-03-05T00:54:31Z 2015-02-22T14:19:15Z public 0 What's the most popular programming language in the world? Or at least those parts of the English-speaking world which are easily found on the Internet? C, C++, Java, PHP, Javascript, VB? Is <a href="http://www.python.org/">Python</a> on the rise on in decline? How do we know?<br /><br />There are a few websites which make the attempt to measure programming language popularity, for some definition of &quot;popularity&quot;. Since they all have different methods of measuring popularity, and choose different proxies to measure (things like the number of job ads or the number of on-line tutorials for a language), they give different results &mdash; sometimes quite radically different, which is a strong indicator that even if language popularity has a single objective definition (and it probably doesn't) none of these methods are measuring it.<br /><br />So keeping in mind that any discussion of language popularity should be taken with a considerable pinch of salt, let's have a look at four well-known sites that try to measure popularity.<br /><br /><span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___1" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">(&nbsp;</b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://import-that.dreamwidth.org/1388.html#cutid1">Read more...</a></b><b class="cut-close">&nbsp;)</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___1" aria-live="assertive"></div><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=import_that&ditemid=1388" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments