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Comment by Sandman | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the title a bit misleading? According to the chart, Java is the most popular language of the year (and the decade, if you take a look at https://sites.google.com/site/pydatalog/pypl/PyPL-PopularitY...).

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First line of the article: "C# had the highest growth in popularity this year (2.3 %), and Python the highest growth this decade (8%)". One of their key metrics to determine popularity is growth.

> One of their key metrics to determine popularity is growth.

I would think one of the key metrics in determining popularity would be popularity ...

It is. I'd think that's fairly clear and obvious from the languages they were comparing.

I find it hard to believe that some newer, smaller language communities did not have a higher growth rate.

"One of," not "only."

Wouldn't a language that goes from 0 users to 1 user within this year easily win this sort of measurement?

Obligatory xkcd http://xkcd.com/1102/

oblig. Zed shaw

http://zedshaw.com/essays/programmer_stats.html

They must be taking only established languages. Otherwise Clojure, Scala or Go would probably beat them all in term of growth.

Not really. The language of year is the one with the largest growth of "popularity share". C# has gone from 8.2% to 10.5% this year, while your presumed language would go from 0% to 0.0000001 % : not a big increase, really.

Furthermore, the growing of C# seems to be the almost same as C++ in the worldwide trends (not only USA):

http://www.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US#q=Java%20tutor...

And also there you can see that India is still the biggest searcher of programming tutorials in the world.

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