[HN Gopher] Relative popularity of programming languages on Hack...
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Relative popularity of programming languages on Hacker News
Author : senko
Score : 70 points
Date : 2022-10-13 12:36 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.senko.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.senko.net)
| senko wrote:
| Spoiler alert (if you've not been visiting HN lately): Rust wins,
| by a lot.
| ss48 wrote:
| One thing to keep in mind is that sometimes the programming
| language is tied more to a framework that gets more articles.
|
| Example would be Dart essentially being synonymous with Flutter
| at this point: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=flutter
|
| Another, Ruby and Rails Framework, C# and .NET .
| smt88 wrote:
| .NET isn't similar because it can be used from C#, C++, F#, and
| VisualBasic as well.
|
| Obviously C# is by far the most common, but F# is
| disproportionately over-discussed on HN compared to its usage,
| and C# is disproportionately under-discussed.
| rjbwork wrote:
| I don't even think RoR is analogous to C# and .NET. It's like
| saying RoR is analogous to Java and the JVM.
|
| RoR is more analogous to ASP.NET and Spring, or similar.
|
| Also, C# is used in Unity, for desktop apps, for console
| apps, for cloud processing, big data processing (especially
| in Azure), etc.
|
| Same goes for Java with Android and the entire Apache big
| data ecosystem.
| dxbydt wrote:
| scala is dead last. btw his script is 167 lines of clean well
| written python. i can rewrite that in 16 lines of scala using
| http4s and cats or whatever dsl is hot these days in scalaland.
| fwiw, probably that's why scala is dead last :)
| incrudible wrote:
| The list of languages alone is more than 16 lines. So, unless
| you were going to write code that's hard to read and annoying
| to modify, you're going to need more than 16 lines. Given that
| you're a Scala programmer, that's probably indeed what you
| would set out to do. Fwiw, _that 's_ probably why Scala is dead
| last.
| melling wrote:
| What happened to Scala? It used to have quite a following.
| Scala 3 was supposed to be a major improvement. No resurgence
| in enthusiasm after it shipped?
| [deleted]
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| I've recently applied to a Scala job that was specifically
| advertised to Java and Kotlin devs because it's hard to hire a
| Scala dev. I hope I get the role, I'm a sucker for an
| interesting programming language.
| incrudible wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_ti.
| ..
| AuthorizedCust wrote:
| R is missing, and it comes up here.
| cestith wrote:
| A great language to do this sort of data gathering with
| probably, too.
| staticelf wrote:
| I mean it's not strange that Rust wins since a lot of new cool
| stuff is made available due to a lot of advancements in wasm and
| the Rust tooling for that.
| cestith wrote:
| Speaking of wasm, that's technically a language too. Looks like
| around 307 stories with "wasm" in the title, by eye.
| ravi11 wrote:
| ncmncm wrote:
| That is not why.
| cestith wrote:
| Perl is not included in the article. The past year in search on
| HN shows 8 articles. That's not going to bump Rust from the top,
| but it's the same as Lua, Lisp, and Erlang.
| irrational wrote:
| > I'd have included Common Lisp as well, but there were no
| stories mentioning it explicitly in the title in the past year.
|
| Does this indicate that the results are only for a single year?
| senko wrote:
| Yes, the results are for the past year (submitted in the past
| 365 days).
| Xophmeister wrote:
| In much the same way you bundled Racket with Scheme, you could
| associate SBCL with Common Lisp.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| I wonder how much this is due to Rust being mentioned for every
| utility or library:
|
| In every language except Rust:
|
| "Show HN: Here is a cool web app I made"
|
| "Show HN: Here is a cool utility I made"
|
| "Show HN: Here is a cool library I made"
|
| Rust:
|
| "Show HN: Here is a cool web app I made in Rust"
|
| "Show HN: Here is a cool utility I made in Rust"
|
| "Show HN: Here is a cool library I made in Rust"
| toyg wrote:
| That's just because people love the language enough to
| evangelize.
|
| 20 years ago it would have been:
|
| "Show Slashdot: here's my cool desktop"
|
| vs
|
| "Show Slashdot: here's my cool desktop running Linux"
| nottorp wrote:
| But is the app any good? The fact that it's written in Rust
| doesn't provide information about that.
| CodeSgt wrote:
| I think it might be one amongst many indirect signals for
| code quality.
|
| It's a hard language, so the author of the program likely
| has at least some amount of prior experience to build off
| of, and to build anything truly substantial with it you
| have to have a deeper understanding of how the code
| actually works than you do with some other languages.
|
| The language does do error handling, type validation,
| memory safety, and null checks really well. So, it's safe
| to assume that the app may have fewer bugs than it's
| counterpart written in, e.g., C or JS.
|
| It could still be shit, of course, but I imagine the
| average quality of an app written in rust would be _at
| least_ a little higher than thay of apps written in many
| other languages.
| nottorp wrote:
| I was thinking more of useful and easy to use than bug
| free...
| vippy wrote:
| Scala devs are too busy wondering about free monads and
| F[Request[F] => Response[F]]. I am very pleased by http4s,
| Doobie, ScalaJS, and the whole ecosystem, really:
| https://http4s.org
| [deleted]
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| Clickbait topic, which actually should have said ,,relative
| popularity of certain types of references to programming
| languages on HN".
| dboreham wrote:
| For example, if references frequently occur in relation to bad
| aspects of a language, then this metric could be the inverse of
| what it seems.
| hbrn wrote:
| "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people
| complain about and the ones nobody uses".
| andsoitis wrote:
| > I'd have included Common Lisp as well, but there were no
| stories mentioning it explicitly in the title in the past year.
|
| When I google
| "https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=common+..."
| one of the _first_ results is "Tutorial Series to learn Common
| Lisp quickly" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31178737 - 5
| months ago.
|
| There are more results within the last 12 months.
| senko wrote:
| Yeah I only counted the phrase "in $LANG", for two reasons:
| * fewer false positives * focuses on what people (share
| abot what they) *did* in/for those languages
|
| It's an imperfect study, for sure, but I think it's indicative.
| brudgers wrote:
| Among its indications is it indicates why "in Rust" is a
| meme.
| brudgers wrote:
| Here is the last year's Common Lisp stories by Popularity
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Zig usually gets in the comments when other languages are
| mentioned because the author of the language is pushing it on HN.
|
| But when I look at what it really provides, linear typing is just
| not on the list, it can't compare to Rust's practical type system
| and maturity at this point.
| jasfi wrote:
| Too bad Nim's not on the list.
| senko wrote:
| I reran it with Nim and here are the results:
|
| * By stories: 18th (17 stories)
|
| * By comments: 15th (168 comments)
|
| * By points: 14th (629 points)
| jasfi wrote:
| Interesting, thanks.
| rob74 wrote:
| Hmmm... if this really just looks for "... in [X]" titles, it
| misses a lot of posts. E.g. today's "New ScyllaDB Go Driver:
| Faster Than GoCQL and Its Rust Counterpart" is about both Go
| (mostly) and Rust, but would be ignored. Same for "Prusti: Static
| Analyzer for Rust". Plus, some people just love to use "Golang"
| instead of "Go"...
| senko wrote:
| It's naive enough that "in Go" would match "in Golang", so we
| got that covered :)
|
| Yeah, it does miss a lot - it'd be much harder to count _all_
| relevant stories and remove false positives. But I believe it
| probably misses out on all languages equally, so it probably
| evens out.
|
| Here's the script, btw:
| https://gist.github.com/senko/b031f61f61d89f96e165659d3f0227...
| gumby wrote:
| I would have guessed this and was glad to see my thoughts
| confirmed. Nice bit of ego support.
|
| More seriously: it would be interesting* to do sentiment analysis
| on the articles and comments. A fair number of recent C++
| articles on HN denigrate it, and any article about C++ inevitably
| generates a bunch of lazy anti-C++ comments. A post on "which
| languages do HN commenters _like_ and _dislike_ the most " would
| be quite eye-opening. I imagine rust would still be quite high,
| but perhaps the rankings would move a lot.
|
| * interesting, yes, but not interesting enough for me to bestir
| myself to do this. I guess I'm just lazy...and not in the
| programming sense!
| yrgulation wrote:
| This shows rust being the most promoted language on HN, and not
| necessarily popular among its readership. I think js and python
| are likely to be more popular but less promoted.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Depends if you mean popular as in most used or most liked. I
| think it's pretty clearly the most liked. It will probably
| never be the most used given the popularity of Python and
| JavaScript.
|
| It sure is nice to have a really well designed language gaining
| popularity though. If I had to use Python and JavaScript for
| the rest of my life I think I might change careers.
| chaxor wrote:
| Yeah, Julia probably has a similar number of users as Rust -
| they just don't inject it into every breath they exhale like
| Rust users do.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Not saying you're wrong, but... do you have any source for
| saying that Julia has as many users as Rust?
| williamstein wrote:
| On TIOBE, Julia (27) and Rust (20) are relatively close
| right now, and TIOBE might have some correlation to number
| of users. https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
| toyg wrote:
| It depends on the definition of "popular".
|
| Used for day-job? JS is probably untouchable in this day and
| age.
|
| Used for hobby projects or self-learning? That's more of an
| open field.
| adamdusty wrote:
| I'd be surprised if rust was within two orders of magnitude
| for either.
| gumby wrote:
| I'm not a fan of rust at all, but I do like non-fankid posts
| and comments about it. It has a couple of good ideas at a cost
| I personally am not willing to endure, but still can learn
| from.
|
| I follow and have written code in other languages like prolog,
| haskell, erlang and forth. I know I will never write any "real"
| code in any of them, and I'm not interested in the literature
| of those heavily involved (unlike C++ which I do follow semi-
| closely) but I am always interested when an article about them
| makes it to the HN front page. Same with rust.
| BTBurke wrote:
| Let's just accept you can build just about anything in any
| language. When I see posts like "I built X in Rust," I just
| assume the process was so onerous that they had to impress others
| by saying they did it the hardest way possible. /s
| criddell wrote:
| If they specify it was made in Rust, then chances are _that 's_
| what's interesting about the project.
|
| If somebody says they rewrote _yes_ in $LANG, I might click
| through because even though the _yes_ command isn 't that
| interesting, the $LANG part may be.
| compumike wrote:
| Thanks for compiling this!
|
| Would be nice to include Crystal https://crystal-lang.org/ but I
| see that it may be harder to search for than the others. On the
| first page of results for
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| only 12 out of 30 results are actually referencing the
| programming language...
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| Julia which is missing ties for 7th in articles, and ranks 5th in
| comments.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| Julia is in 13th place for [articles], and 9th for [comments],
| which OP also confirms above
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33191448). The actual
| numbers posted by OP are somehow different from the ones
| Algolia returns, but the ranking is the same in either case.
|
| [articles]:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
| [comments]:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
| makz wrote:
| The results for Clojure surprise me, I remember around 2015 there
| was a trend in which I saw like two or threes stories every week
| about Clojure.
| gist wrote:
| That could also be because a story about something tickles
| others to post other stories and then it snowballs. (Noting
| that I noticed the same about Clojure years before that and
| made a comment elsewhere that it was what HN cared about
| because it was a dialect of LISP which PG cared about (for lack
| of a better way to put it).
| efficax wrote:
| poor scala, you deserve better
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Not seeing Jai or Odin is a bit sad, but at the same time
| relatively accurate because their communities are much smaller
| and for the most part Zig is eating their lunch.
| chubot wrote:
| I thought Jai was dead since there's no code and very little
| info other than video about it
|
| But apparently it is being used in closed beta
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Not sure if the closed beta was a good idea for a programming
| language...
| ncann wrote:
| Reminds me of the brilliant phrase "The Rust Evangelism
| Strikeforce"
| kragen wrote:
| I wonder where Perl, VB, assembly, SQL, R, Objective-C, and
| Matlab would end up on the list if they were included.
| baby wrote:
| No ocaml. Oh well
| senko wrote:
| Uh, I forgot to include OCaml and Julia. Sorry, I have no
| excuse.
|
| Here's how they stack up (just added both of them to the list
| of languages and reran it):
|
| By number of stories: 13. Julia (35 stories), 18. OCaml (13
| stories)
|
| By number of comments: 9. Julia (498 comments), 19. OCaml (82
| comments)
|
| By points: 9. Julia (1542 points), 15. OCaml (503 points)
|
| I link to the Python script I used to generate this, so if you
| want to experiment with different date range or other
| languages/search terms, feel free to explore! (I do think
| Algolia API has some limits on the number of results tho so
| might not work out of the box for much longer time periods)
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > 15. OCaml (503 points)
|
| I expected OCaml to rank much higher as it's often in the top
| stories. I must be biased.
| senko wrote:
| I think the fact that it's lower on the number of posts
| indicates that there's less content about it, but people
| are more engaged (and posts more popular) when there is a
| story involving it.
|
| Also, as other commenters noted, this doesn't catch _all_
| stories (just the ones with a specific phrase) to minimize
| false positives. Although for OCaml, the false positives
| would be pretty rare.
| cestith wrote:
| Perl is 8 stories. I haven't looked at the other metrics.
| Jhsto wrote:
| Can you also check APL?
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| Would you mind updating the article with these two?
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| It would be interesting to see the evolution of those numbers and
| ranking over time, maybe on a month or quarter granularity.
| nairboon wrote:
| D is also missing.
| bakugo wrote:
| No surprise here, Rust users are physically incapable of going 10
| seconds without mentioning that they use Rust.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Apparently not just Rust users but people who want to complain
| about it. Well done for keeping up Rusts numbers.
| cercatrova wrote:
| I've seen more complaining about Rust and its users on HN
| than I've actually seen Rust users.
| pdimitar wrote:
| People who get stuff done and are successfully using a
| technology rarely go around advocating for it.
|
| Point being, Rust might be even more popular than what this
| post suggests. But then again that could go for any other
| language. Apart from Rust I also work with Elixir a lot and
| I know that most of its devs are not at all vocal; they're
| too busy being successful and don't need external
| validation -- they know the benefits of the tech and are
| using it to their full advantage.
|
| I know that I do that, and I know others. Both with Elixir
| and Rust.
| necovek wrote:
| You mentioned Elixir (in a thread about Rust) and Rust a
| fair number of times to consider yourself "not at all
| vocal", so perhaps you are not a case in your point :)
| pdimitar wrote:
| The fact that I am mentioning the languages every now and
| then is not the same thing as constantly advocating for
| them.
|
| Nuance, please. There is not only the 0% and the 100%.
| smt88 wrote:
| I don't use Rust or make pro-Rust comments, but the pro-Rust
| comments don't bother me at all. They're respectful and
| substantive.
|
| The anti-Rust comments, like yours, are irritating, off-topic,
| and not adding anything to the discussion. If you want to start
| a language flamewar, there are better places to do it.
| woojoo666 wrote:
| I think the point is that many HN posts mention "I made X in
| Rust", whereas similar projects using Go or Javascript don't
| mention the language in the post title. So it does seem like
| Rust users tend to like vocalizing it.
|
| I also think this study is slightly biased towards new and
| hip languages. For example, less people are going to vocalize
| that their new web app is made with Javascript, because
| that's already the assumption. But Elixir will almost
| certainly be mentioned
| adamdusty wrote:
| The pro rust comments on rust posts are great. The pro rust
| comments on every other post about any other language are not
| as great.
| anotherevan wrote:
| I compile my Rust programs on Arch Linux.
| necovek wrote:
| I am disappointed you haven't moved to NixOS yet.
|
| In all seriousness, I like reading about them all, because
| they do tend to move the needle in the right direction.
| ndiddy wrote:
| My favorite part is when it's a closed-source program so the
| language it's written in is barely relevant to its users
| pdimitar wrote:
| Any such Rust examples?
| cercatrova wrote:
| Discord: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26227339
|
| It's hard to say for most because, well, it's closed
| source. Unless they talk about it publicly like Discord, we
| won't know.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Discord is a commercial product that makes quite a lot of
| money though. Hardly a good example.
|
| Had it been something like `ripgrep` -- which is open but
| yeah imagine it wasn't -- then I'd immediately agree with
| you.
|
| And now I'm confused what point you're trying to make?
|
| I mean, commercial products written in many languages are
| closed source and I don't feel that reflects negatively
| on any of them.
| cercatrova wrote:
| I'm not sure what point _you 're_ trying to make
| actually. You asked (as I understood it) for any Rust
| examples of closed source programs, for which I provided
| Discord. Now you're talking about how closed source does
| or does not "reflects negatively on any of them" which I
| never said anything about at all.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Ah, I was going to the root of your comment so assumed
| that you're posting it in support of the ridiculous claim
| that Rust users can't shut up about it.
|
| Sorry if it's a wrong assumption then.
| stevenally wrote:
| I love Tcl/Tk....
| [deleted]
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