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Comment by fuckstick | Hacker News Reader

> It would seem sensible that since Facebook poured a lot of resources in optimizing PHP

Well they sort of half assed tried years ago - they employed GvR at one point. Then they gave up and they continue to lean heavily on C++, Java and there is thing they developed in the interim: Go.

> Also, Python is the first or second most popular language

Hogwash. For all the open source and other development that occurs and is “indexed” on internet discussion forums there is countless boring ass shit behind the scenes in sweatshops around the world and corporate back rooms. PHP, Java, and C# are still probably more popular to start.

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> For all the open source and other development that occurs and is “indexed” on internet discussion forums there is countless boring ass shit behind the scenes in sweatshops around the world and corporate back rooms.

Much of which is also in Python.

JS is also very popular. Not for the same things as Python but in some aspects it's becoming modern PHP (which is still popular, if maybe aging somewhat kinda like Perl). But Python is definitely very popular for new back room stuff (source: long digital sweatshop career)

I mean, sure, but I’m just saying point me to a source that is ranking Python as #1 or #2 most popular. If it’s TIOBE or something similar it’s meaningless.

I say this as someone that has made their career mostly on the “top 5” TIOBE languages - but that ranking is a bunch of crap for the overall commercial software world.

C? Give me a fucking break. Never in 20 years have I known there to be more C than Java jobs.

And now everyone and their dog including doctors and other non tech-savvy professionals are doing Intro to Python courses (and then never touching it again) so they too can feel like they know something about ML or stats. Lot of noise.

>I mean, sure, but I’m just saying point me to a source that is ranking Python as #1 or #2 most popular. If it’s TIOBE or something similar it’s meaningless.

According to 2022 Stack Overflow developer survey, if we exclude HTML, SQL and Bash, top five languages (as in being used by most developers) are: Javascript, Python, Typescript, Java and C#.

https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pushes/

Checking here, if we go by pushes on GitHub, JS, Python, Ruby, Java, PHP are the top for 2021.

This is of course biased to only stuff on GitHu band public (assuming, but doubt they're publishing private data on BigQuery).

No idea how much of that is pet projects vs production of course.

Corporate has a faceless horde of Java devs.

Lots of C#, too. And I specialized in C# since it seemed a little bit more enjoyable than Java at the time and the jobs were plenty. Of course, Java changed quite a bit since then so it might be more desirable than it was.

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