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Comment by jakegmaths | Hacker News Reader

Your query for Java will include all instances of JavaScript as well, so you're over representing Java.

Similarly, the Rust query will include "trust", "antitrust", "frustration" and a bunch of other words

Reminded me about Scunthorpe problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

A guerilla marketing plan for a new language is to call it a common one word syllable, so that it appears much more prominent than it really is on badly-done popularity contests.

Call it "Go", for example.

(Necessary disclaimer for the irony-impaired: this is a joke and an attempt at being witty.)

You also wouldn't acronym hijack overload to boost mental presence in gamers LOL

Let’s make a language called “A” in that case. (I mean C was fine, so why not one letter?)

Or call it the name of a popular song to appeal to the youngins.

I present to you "Gangam C"

Amusingly, the chart shows Rust's popularity starting from before its release. The rust hype crowd is so exuberant, they began before the language even existed!

Now if we only could disambiguate words based on context. But you'd need a good language model for that, and we don't... wait.

Ah right… maybe even more unexpected then to see a decline

I'm not so sure, while Java's never looked better to me, it does "feel" to me to be in significant decline in terms of what people are asking for on LinkedIn.

I'd imagine these days typescript or node might be taking over some of what would have hit on javascript.

Recruiting Java developers is easy mode, there are rather large consultancies and similar suppliers that will sell or rent them to you in bulk so you don't need to nag with adverts to the same extent as with pythonistas and rubyists and TypeScript.

But there is likely some decline for Java. I'd bet Elixir and Erlang have been nibbling away on the JVM space for quite some time, they make it pretty comfortable to build the kind of systems you'd otherwise use a JVM-JMS-Wildfly/JBoss rig for. Oracle doesn't help, they take zero issue with being widely perceived as nasty and it takes a bit of courage and knowledge to manage to avoid getting a call from them at your inconvenience.

Speaking as someone who ended up in the corporate Java world somewhat accidentally (wasn't deep in the ecosystem before): even the most invested Java shops seem wary of Oracle's influence now. Questioning Oracle tech, if not outright planning an exit strategy, feels like the default stance.

Most such places probably have some trauma related to Oracle now. Someone spun up the wrong JVM by accident and within hours salespeople were on the phone with some middle manager about how they would like to pay for it, that kind of thing. Or just the issue of injecting their surveillance trojans everywhere and knowing they're there, that's pretty off-putting in itself.

Which is a pity, once you learn to submit to and tolerate Maven it's generally a very productive and for the most part convenient language and 'ecosystem'. It's like Debian, even if you fuck up badly there is likely a documented way to fix it. And there are good libraries for pretty much anything one could want to do.

New Java looks actually good, but most of the Java actual ecosystem is stuck in the past.... and you will mostly work within the existing ecosystem

a) Does your query for 'JS' return instances of 'JSON'?

b) The ultimate hard search topic for is 'R' / 'R language'. Check if you think you index it corectly. Or related terms like RStudio, Posit, [R]Shiny, tidyverse, data.table, Hadleyverse...

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