Programming Language Rankings: February 2012
redmonk.com
redmonk.com
Also, I wish Scala was more popular :)
You can also hedge your bets with Java a bit, because unlike Obj-C it's important outside mobile apps.
For example, you have to write all these getters and setters ad nauseam, even if all they do is just setting the damn variable. Or the anonymous classes, the syntax is horrible.
Now I understand that the object model is simple and easy to understand, but still, I prefer Scala more. It works with java, but it's many times easier to actually use.
I also format code to match a small but wide monitor (MacBook Air 13) and although a lot of people would understandably not like the longer line formatting using up to 100 columns, my code density is good - a typical method easily fits on my display. I also favor short classes.
I have suggestion for another chart someone may be interested in creating. A time series of such images. It would be even more awesome if the traces all the movements are depicted in a single image like a snake.
(You haven't provided raw data, so I'll take an example from the raw data Drew Conway posted.)
The range in rank value for the stackoverflow tags is from 1 to 56, but the range in "# of Tags" that rank is based upon is from 0 to 82,923 and the data is so skewed that only 11 of 56 languages have above average "# of Tags".
Most spreadsheets will provide easy to use functions to calculate the mean, standard deviation, and normalized scores (STANDARDIZE in LibreOffice).
Please plot normalized data not rankings.
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Similarly, the range in rank value for the github "# of Projects" is from 1 to 56, but the range in "# of Projects" is more like 0 to 104,239!
http://www.r-chart.com/2010/08/github-stats-on-programming-l...
The horizontal axis would just be popularity.
Maybe some of these popular languages have more tags because they're POS languages that cause grief and consequently many more questions/posts that are created by even a smaller group of users.
Also there's no time element, so a supposed popular language may have had zero tags created in the last year, yet it only drops marginally relative to the pack. And an highly active new language is ranked against all historical data of older languages making it less popular than it really is.
[EDIT] It is surprising it's not exponential.
So, no conclusions regarding relative popularity between two languages should be drawn from the diagram. (It's just an ordering. The distance between the first and second most popular language, for example, is exactly 1.)
Stackoverflow really fills the gap if there is no good alternative, it's a reflection of the ecosystem around the language than its popularity.
Perhaps the number of new projects or commits in a given language would be more indicative of a language's true popularity. (Not that it's a perfect metric either)