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Comment by ksenzee | Hacker News Reader

JavaScript is the most commonly used programming language among people who answered this survey. It is astounding to me that people assume the SO survey is representative of all software developers, when in reality it's not even representative of all SO users, let alone everyone who writes software.

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This comment convinced me to flag the post, similar to the way I try to flag all posts with headlines that misinterpret or misstate scientific findings. We shouldn't reward authors who choose to twist facts in order to get clicks.

The headline is a quote from the Stack Overflow survey.

The headline for the survey itself isn't misleading. It told me what it was and was worth clicking on. The survey itself also included this sentence: "This survey reached about .4% of all developers on earth."

My gripe is with clicking on something that isn't what it says it is, not with whether or not the original survey was written up in a flawed way.

The source survey is here: http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016 "It's official, USA has the most programmers on earth"

When really, it's just that they answered this particular online poll on this website popular in the USA.

"JavaScript, the most poorly documented language on earth." Because, well, it probably is. You don't go to a central JavaScript reference guide, you google for stuff. Or maybe you're unemployed and have time to answer polls on websites.

MDN documentation is excellent. Node also now has pretty good docs. Googling vs. central docs is more driven by the culture of the programmers. Google's search algorithms also have most of the blame for driving searchers to blogs/articles/SO instead of central docs.

I do agree that this survey is not at all representative, which is why I decided to flag OP.

On the other hand, JavaScript is, unfortenately, everywhere, so it is not hard for me to believe it is actually the most widespread.

thats right, sample population are people who are using these platforms, no wonder the answer trends towards the web technology. Great point.

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