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Comment by westoncb | Hacker News Reader

Is it the most used language in the world? Seems like I keep hearing comments like that, but the rankings I've seen don't list it that way.

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It's the most visibly used language. But the world runs on a ton of code that isn't the web.

According to Stackoverflow's developer survey it is [1]. Doesn't surprise me since developing for web means JavaScript.

Curious to know what rankings you are referring to though.

[1]: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#technology

I didn't see anything on methodology, but I'm assuming they're just surveying their users—in which case, I think it would make some sense for javascript to be overrepresented.

I'd be curious to see the methodology behind the rankings you speak of.

EDIT: saw the sibling thread.

What rankings have you been seeing? Javascript is on top of the list from what I've been seeing.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#technology

Tiobe index for one. But I just searched Google and checked the top few.

The TIOBE index has always been a bit weird. If you read their note about their methodology, you'll see that it's measuring something kind of interesting, but not really what you'd call "the most used languages." For example, IIRC part of a language's TIOBE ranking is how many college courses use it.

Do you know of another more objective source, though?

Other folks are citing Github and Stack Overflow, but they are just reporting on proportions used on their own sites, and I would not be at all surprised to find that both those sites are more popular with web developers than say Java or C/C++/C# or Visual Basic devs (all those languages outrank javascript on Tiobe).

That seems pretty likely to be true of Github. But for Stack Overflow, I would be really surprised. Stack Overflow has had a huge and thriving C# community from the start, and it's got so much page rank that questions about any language, "web" or not, are likely to lead there. The only languages that seem likely to be underrepresented are ones that are mainly used by people who learned them long ago and aren't gaining any more users (like MUMPS or something), since those people are unlikely to have questions.

At least according to Github: https://octoverse.github.com/ - it's in its own class compared to the others: 2.3m to the next most popular (1m, python)

Yeah, but there's a trivial selection effect going on with Github.

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