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Comment by oneeyedpigeon | Hacker News Reader

Interesting data. The founders (Joel Spolsky, Jeff Atwood) are strong proponents of Windows programming, and the initial popularity of .net and c# make a lot of sense in that context. As the site has become more and more popular, the audience now consists of many people who aren't even aware of who those founders are, let alone follow their work. As such, the language spread is much more representative.

As someone who never goes anywhere near Windows programming, I'm quite pleased about the direction this trend has taken.

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Given StackOverflow's structure and operational methods, one would expect questions about products in the Microsoft stack to decline as searches return more relevant answers.

To put it another way, as the site matures, more questions about x will tend to correlate to the inverse of x's formal repositories of knowledge.

A user who finds an answer to their ASP.NET question on StackOverflow, doesn't ask a new question.

In the lifetime of the site c# 3 came out with a lot of new programming paradigms, ASP.Net MVC has come out, Silverlight has come and gone, WPF has gone from being something no-one uses to something a lot of people do and windows phone and now windows 8 have come out.

Contrast that to Java which had Android, which people don't seem to bother tagging as Java? And that's about it I think? And Java grew and stabilized, so it really is probably just down to their initial users consisted overwhelmingly of .Net developers.

I can say anecdotally this applies to me. I use ASP.NET and C# heavily and am a daily user on StackOverflow, but I rarely find myself needing to ask a question there. I usually just find an answer to what I need and vote and favorite accordingly. It's become more of a repository of information for me than when it started out.

Some drop in ASP.Net/C# popularity wouldn't surprise me either though.

This is a problem I run into. As a more junior developer, nearly all of my questions I haven't been able to answer with research have already been answered on stackoverflow. Employers want me to have tons of points, but I don't usually have to ask any questions.

Your employers actually track your StackOverflow karma??

I posit that Microsoft has more to do with this trend than anything else.

I was a Windows / Microsoft tools only developer for many many years and only recently switched to Javascript / Node.js and OSS tools for our business applications.

My usage of S.O. almost exactly parallels what you see in that graph over the time period and I'm personally aware of a great many other Windows developers moving away from it recently.

The reason for myself has absolutely nothing to do with Joel or Jeff and everything to do with Microsoft pushing out the smaller professional developers who supported them and by extension Windows for decades in favour of policies that benefit only the very big software shops and students / dabblers and then recently with Windows 8 basically giving us all the final push away in many, many different ways.

As for your last sentence; as a professional software developer of well over 20 years who 'goes near' Windows programming and everything else I can get my hands on I can't fathom how anyone can take pleasure in less opportunity and a smaller market and fewer interesting platforms to work with.

It probably has more to do with the maturity of the framework and less to do with audience popularity (although I'm sure that is a factor). That's just the nature of SO. The ios graph demonstrates this.

Agreed. Most of the easier .Net questions have already been answered. Most of the harder ones too, thanks to Jon Skeet.

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