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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to tell if the fact that CoffeeScript is #6 (the highest ranked major language) and Javascript is #51 (second to last) is a reflection on how much of a shift CS is from JS, or on the quality of methodology and metrics in the OP.

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I'd say it's a byproduct of the fact that only in-the-know developers are using CoffeeScript, while JavaScript is being written by every rank-and-file amateur web dev in the world. There is likely an inverse correlation between language popularity and median code quality.

At the risk of being a bit incendiary, I would observe that you can apply that alternate hypothesis across pretty much the entire chart. One could propose that what we see there is something more like "inverse average skill of the developers using this language". JS is an outlier due to the fact that the language's position on the web has a lot of hacks using it. (This is not itself a reflection on the language, but on its position in the world.) It's not perfect (I'd toss Auguas and Puppet out of this entirely as they aren't really programming languages; assembler probably really is a lack of expressiveness, VHDL possibly the same), and I'm not really proposing it as The Answer, but it is an interesting and viable alternate hypothesis.

>JS is an outlier due to the fact that the language's position on the web has a lot of hacks using it.

Just like all those hacks using Fixed-format Fortran and Assembly?