Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

The info-graphic cheekily dissolves into an ad, which I guess is OK given the context.

I'm surprised to see JavaScript as the most popular language, but pretty pleased.

Living in New Hampshire I don't have many programmer friends, so communities like StackOverflow are important to me. Relatively new additions like the SO JavaScript chatroom[1] help too.

It may not feel like a community in the traditional sense to some, but in a lot of ways StackOverflow gives me the encouragement I need to help people, practice my craft and keep learning.[2] It really means a lot to me (and I'm sure a lot of others).

Also, note that the tiny link below the info-graphic has the raw data if you want to take a look at all the numbers[3].

[1] http://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/17/javascript

[2] http://i.imgur.com/POZmt.png

[3] https://www.surveymonkey.com/sr.aspx?sm=vU4rF_2bPVQaftSo1s69...

View on HN

JS is #1, and JQuery is #3. That's a runaway win by the JavaScript stack.

Note that the "win" is less about language-vs-language and more about environment. Fifteen years ago, you saw Java score a similar rapid "win" over C++, which is gave up more slowly to C# over the following decade.

What this really shows is that (1) most programming is "IT" programming (i.e. focused development for specific businesses), (2) most IT programming is user-focused, and (3) we've seen a rapid shift in the customer's preferred UI environment.

Java was a revelation for people developing client software in the 90's. It was faster and easier, and in many cases could be deployed over the web. Its later wins on the server backend (which came more slowly) were driven by the client side.

And Javascript is taking that mantle, driven by the mobile world. Yes, you could still develop a Windows client app, but it won't work on your employees iPhones and Galaxy S3's. So you deploy a web app instead.

And thus you use Javascript.

I think it's a bit more complicated than that. Business / or "IT" as you call often has DB + server-side + client-side. The server-side has been taken over mostly everywhere by either Java or its younger cousin C# and you go to any big company and you'll find one of these two languages heavily used.

What is changing now is that people / employees have realized that it's convenient to be able to use any browser, from any device (desktop / laptop / tablet / smartphone), from any OS (iOS, Linux / Android, OS X, Windows) on the client-side.

And the one indisputed king inside the browser to code the client-side is JavaScript.

IMHO It's not exactly as if monothreaded JavaScript engines are going to displace server-side Java / C# anytime soon.

Webapps are accessed from clients using JavaScript. But Webapps themselves, at least for many "enterprisey" stuff are very often coded in Java or C# (or at least virtually always in languages targetting either the JVM or .Net).

I don't think we actually disagree. Backend language choices have always shown more diversity, and will continue to do so. But still, the number of lines of code and developer hours dedicated to these applications is dominated by the front end. With very few exceptions, UI apps have always been "heavier" than the data engines behind them.

So even though C# won't be going away any time soon, it still shows well below Javascript in terms of "acceptance".

According to the TIOBE index[1], it only shows that SO is very biased toward javascript, not that it is more or less used. StackOverflow is simply the new goto place for js programmers and seems to become more and more exclusively driven by web development, which might not reflect the whole programming industry.

[1] http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

True to a degree, but it's not as if TIOBE is unbiased.

Of all places I'm surprised SO would consider jQuery a language separate from Javascript, an aggregate with a footnote would seem more appropriate.

Not a big deal it just seems odd to me. At least they didn't put HTML up there :)

I was surprised by that too. Maybe they allowed free-form answers.

No, it was a checkbox array (I took the survey). The thing is, saying you use jQuery is not the same as saying you use Javascript. The only Javascript I really use is jQuery. I have no deep JS needs, so I only use jQuery to make interfaces pretty. I chose jQuery (and C#, and some others) but did not choose JS.

Still - you are yet beholden to the quirks of JS like how operator precedence and casting works.

You should have also added JS even though you use the jQuery library extensively.

Yeah, Javascript must be really confusing to have so many people asking questions about it :-).

I jest, but seriously, popularity of a tag on StackOverflow should be used to determine one thing: popularity of a tag on StackOverflow. There are more important factors influencing a subject's popularity on SO than its overall popularity. A big factor is where the community around the technology tends to congregate. Many projects (like Guava: http://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/) officially endorse StackOverflow as the place to ask questions, because the maintainers and experts will be monitoring SO. That will have an inflating impact on its relative popularity.

Indeed, mega-monsters like C++ and Python are old enough that Google sends people away from SO to more traditional old books and blog posts which already have most questions answered.

To be fair, positions 1, 2 and 3 (JavaScript, SQL, jQuery) are "common" languages in that most web developers use/need them in addition to their core server language/framework (apart from node.js of course).

These numbers are not mutually exclusive. The caption for that graph is "% of respondents who have worked with a particular language".

Some high percent of developers in a web company have most likely worked with Javascript. Let's say it's 70%, then that's (roughly) 70% of developers who work with Ruby on Rails, Django, PHP, and ASP.net, among others. This is also true of SQL, which is the number 2 result.

Interesting to see that "Other Europe" is so high with 16.7% of respondents, especially since they have the biggest European countries listed out separately. My guess is that this shows the large number of developers in Eastern Europe.

"Other Europe" is actually just slightly under-represented, not overly popular. All the small countries are pretty big when put together.

Europe has a population of 595M, UK+France+Germany+Italy is 269M, or 45% of Europe. On StackOverflow, the big countries account for 54% of all European respondents.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com