Import That!

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 Python on the rise on in decline? How do we know?

There are a few websites which make the attempt to measure programming language popularity, for some definition of "popularity". 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 — 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.

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.

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