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Comment by mirekrusin | Hacker News Reader

Something's fishy with this ranking, ie. web-only list has "Processing" before "Clojure", "PHP" before "Ruby" and "Go", for enterprise-only "C" before "Java" - I don't buy it, this data looks like garbage.

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Perhaps your circle of experience isn't representative of the wider community? Personally, I don't find the ranking of PHP surprising. One word, WordPress. Plus, there are probably bespoke PHP applications running in countless companies.

Still, Processing as a web language?

It makes sense to me:

http://processingjs.org/

There's also a whole website that allows people to learn programming by using Processing (guessing either a fork or alternative to processingjs or something else) and it's pretty popular. I think Khan Academy had a variation of it too. The canvas in the browser makes a useful tool for Processing to use.

There's also:

http://hello.processing.org/

Which is interactive and has a video lecture attached to it all in-browser.

Now if your concern is processing in production, I cannot comment on that, but for academic use (people learning programming) it's really useful. It is also useful for visual designers so wouldn't surprise me if they use it on the web too.

It's interesting to play with their ranking editor. It really does highlight how variable some of these lists are depending on what you consider to be part of a "top" language.

For example, I'd personally completely remove stack overflow questions. It could mean a language is incredibly complex rather than important or commonly used.

Excellent point. For example, I almost never need to search or look up documentation for React.

But for Angular 2, I can't do anything without looking up the documentation (at least they did an excellent job writing it).

So I would say you are right that StackOverflow is a better indicator of complexity than popularity.

Or it could be that the best resources for information about a specific language exist outside of stackoverflow; I think this is often the case with Rust, for instance, where I will generally turn to users.rust-lang.org, or IRC for questions that I would turn to SO for in other languages; and when I end up googling particular questions I more often end up at somebody's personal blog.

Perl was also hit hard by this for awhile as it had its own PerlMonks site that was where people went until recently.

Far less likely to see Java in embedded / systems programming so I'm not surprised by C being before Java. Remember this industry is pretty big and reaches all other industries and there's also policies that companies or clients build up on.

PHP is way more popular than Ruby in my circles so I guess it matters where you are and who you know.

Isn't it just based on search hits?

yes, looks completely unrepresentative to me

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