On Friday, 26 January 2018 at 09:02:03 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
While this analysis of language popularity on Github is
enlightening:
http://www.benfrederickson.com/ranking-programming-languages-by-github-users/
I found the older analysis of how programmers transition (or
adopt new languages) more interesting:
https://blog.sourced.tech/post/language_migrations/
Like how people move from Rust to Go. And from Go to Python:
https://blog.sourced.tech/post/language_migrations/sum_matrix_22lang_eig.svg
Also the growth of Java is larger than I would anticipate:
https://blog.sourced.tech/post/language_migrations/eigenvect_stack_22lang.png
Granted, Java has gotten quite a few convenience features over
the years.
I find it fascinating that C# is in the "languages to avoid"
section, because from my perspective it's receiving more and more
adoption as the modern alternative to Java, in a way that Go and
Rust are not. Different markets and all of that. So I can't see
why C# would be seen as a language that is dropping in popularity
(though I don't use it myself).
I do worry that, having been using D for about 3 1/2 years now,
that the perceptions of D outside of this community don't seem to
be changing much. It does seem to make a huge difference to have
a big company behind a language, purely for the "free
advertisement". Most people at my university, outside of the
computer science department, that are using languages like Python
and R and MATLAB the most, are very aware of Rust and Go, but not
D. I wonder if we do need to pay more attention to attracting new
users just to get people talking about it.
