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Comment by achat | Hacker News Reader

Somehow I do not feel confidant about correlating language popularity on stackoverflow to the actual popularity. For some languages (e.g. in my observation:, c#, objective c), there are only few tutorial/sample code outside of stackoverflow as compared to other languages (e.g. again in my observation Java). This makes more and more activity on stackoverflow for some languages as compared to the other languages which has more sample/tutorial on other place on internet. In my observation, whenever I am writing code in c# and objective c, I almost always land to stackoverflow by google search but this is not the case whenever I write code in JAVA

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(disclaimer: i'm the author) it's important to keep two things in mind when considering any ranking: first, and most obviously, no language ranking will be perfect for all readers, because the metrics for ranking languages will vary on an individual basis. second, the intent of the ranking. for our purposes at redmonk, this is an important consideration, because we neither intend to nor claim to produce rankings that are representative of language use broadly. if the rankings were representative of all use, languages such as COBOL would have a substantial presence on the list. we are rather interested in communities that we believe to be more predictive in terms of future use, of which github and stackoverflow are two obvious examples. the sustained strength of javascript on both properties has been one example of their ability to identify trending languages.

as for the criticisms regarding the usage of stackoverflow above, this is why we correlate the stackoverflow rankings with github. one represents discussion and research about a language, the other is manifestation of activity within a language. what's interesting is that the correlation between these properties has historically been strong and appears to be getting stronger over time.

again, no ranking is perfect - ours included - but we feel that measuring programming language interest and traction via these properties is at the very least an interesting datapoint.

Completely agree. I commented based on my personal observation which, I guess, can not be generalized.

Or such languages have only few tutorial/samples in wild web because of superior quality of official documentation. Or, in circular logic, because of existence of good community on stackoverflow.

It's not called JAVA. It's called Java. Why do you write it in all-caps?

Does that matter? Are Java and JAVA so different? I am not a native English speaker.

Typically, all caps in a name indicate the word is an acronym. With Java being a proper noun, only the first letter should be capitalized.

There are plenty of exceptions, of course, especially in the tech field.

Btw, I wouldn't have guessed that English is not your native language.

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