Can you name the 25 most popular programming languages? | Hacker News Reader

Can you name the 25 most popular programming languages?

sporcle.com

20 pointsSandB0x21 comments

Cool.

Also check out the related Hello, World! test http://www.sporcle.com/games/psychofish25/hello_world_syntax (where you really want to see if what language you type in matches the slot you think it should be in). Brought back some old memories.

21/25 with SQL, Assembly, Actionscript, and Delphi missing. What happened to Smalltalk?

I'm always kind of suspect of these 'programming language popularity' measurements because they usually rely on search engine result volume. I think a more meaningful metric would be, say, job openings by programming language.

This is nice as well http://www.sporcle.com/games/psychofish25/hello_world_syntax

Wouldn't JavaScript be print('Hello, World!') instead of document.write('Hello, World!')? The DOM isn't part of JavaScript; it's just a common environment. I would assume that the official JavaScript shell's environment would be assumed instead.

Or rather: alert('Hello, World!')

Since when is SQL a programming language?

I put that on the list just to piss pedants off.

If you're not careful, I'll put HTML on there to see you really squirm:-)

Kidding aside, it's there because I think it's interesting to see where it stacks up against other things.

(By the way, the list I am referring to, is of course the original site at http://LangPop.com - I had nothing else to do with this quiz)

Turing completeness should be the minimal standard to be considered a programming language. SQL is a pseudo-relational query & update language. HTML is a markup language. Both are useful. Neither are programming languages.

There are SQL extensions to make it Turing complete, because Turing completeness is pretty darn useful.

Absolutely correct, but I don't really give a shit :-) I'm curious to see how it fares against other languages. I'd rather have more data than less. You can always use a magic marker to cover it up on your computer screen if it offends you.

There's a reason behind things like that too. It's a good check on the results to see how well SQL does in, say, job listings, where one listing might be a hit for both Java and SQL, as opposed to Ohloh, where, yes, SQL is going to be present in many projects, but not a majority of the code. And that makes sense, because pretty much anyone out there is going to know and use some SQL, so as a job skill, it's extremely popular.

T-SQL and Postgres SQL are turing complete. I think at that point you can call it a programming language.

How is D is on the list? And how is Objective C less popular than Lisp?

I'd be curious to see where this list comes from...

lisp users generate more popularity units per capita than objective c users, because they are true believers rather than seeking dollars...

Yeah I doubt it's in any way accurate. You can get a very rough guide (albeit skewed towards .net) from http://stackoverflow.com/tags.

It apparently uses my stats at http://LangPop.com . While the numbers are rough, and there are some (stated) biases, I think they do a pretty good job of reflecting reality, and in any case, you get everything broken down with a normalized chart, so you can play around with the weights of different things.

As to why anything is on that list: because I put it there. In some cases, after being asked to.

(BTW, I know the IRC numbers for the most recent version are a bit off - I'm currently working on that).

Ah, fair enough. I didn't spot the source. If you were omnipotent and could get at all the information directly, what would you consider to be a true measure of popularity? (Eg, number of people who know each language, total time spent writing in each language over the last week)

That's a good question! I think that even in that case, the best answer would be to break things out so that people could see the different categories. The amount of code in production (this is something where langpop.com likely falls short: I can't think of any way of getting data on all the COBOL out there without paying through the nose for it) certainly counts for something in terms of popularity, but so does the language most people know some of. So does what's hot these days and being used for new systems being written.

I think, though, that ultimately it doesn't really matter once you get past a certain threshold and see that people are writing libraries for the language.

D was easy though - I went to type "Delphi" and "D" popped up. Cool, got one for free.

I guessed 21/25 in the time limit. Missed ones are Shell, ActionScript, Tcl, and Cobol.

24/25. Missed ColdFusion.

Why the heck do they put SQL as a language but not HTML, CSS, or Makefiles? I kept trying variants of those, because once I got SQL anything goes...

lol I missed... delphi, coldfusion, scheme,tcl, cobol

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