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πŸ“Š Languages' Popularity on DEV

Boris Jamot ✊ / on October 31, 2018

Today, while writing an article on PHP resources on DEV, I found myself comparing the number of articles of the most popular language tags out ther...
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Ben Halpern

It looks like JavaScript is the most complicated and error-prone language, that's why so many people need to talk about it on DEV

I think this is somewhat true. JS has lots of issues and a complicated history, but it’s still practical as hell given its popularity.

JavaScript: Famous for being famous.

And yeah, the site is pretty web-centric.

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rhymes

JavaScript: Famous for being famous.

An instagram influencer basically

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kayis profile image
K

Pf

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kaelscion • Edited

Or a member of the Kardashian family

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Ben Halpern

This definitely calls for a listicle post mapping JS libs/frameworks to members of the Kardashian family.

Kris is jQuery

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Jesse M. Holmes

I love JavaScript’s story, how it was this hastily created, incredibly flawed plaything that has grown into one of the most utilized tools in existence. It was an underdogβ€”actually, it wasn’t even in the same fightβ€”but it has allowed so many other underdogs to break into this industry. For better or worse, I love a good backstory.

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Helen Anderson

There's 100 posts tagged with SQL. If you consider that a language in this case :)

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jess unrein

Ooh good point. I know this site is very web focused right now, but I’d love to see more quality SQL and database content represented.

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Helen Anderson

Well in that case ...

I highly recommend Randy (@randysims ), Mark (@booyaa ), and me :D

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jess unrein

Excellent. Thank you for the follow suggestions. There are just so many people! 😡

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kaelscion

Do tutorials on how to use ORMs count as db content?

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jess unrein

Yeah definitely!

What's your poison: Django ORM or SQLAlchemy?

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Templar++ • Edited

Not a big fan of JS myself, but you know there are two types of languages:
a) everyone complains about them
b) nobody is using them

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Henry πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’»

Haha, that's a Bjarne Stroustrup quote right? Absolutely true though.

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Templar++

Yup, that's right :)

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Ali Spittel

I think JavaScript is often easier to write about too since the output is more visual. People also tend to read JavaScript stuff more too β€” My backend posts have next to no views compared to my front end ones.

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Boris Jamot ✊ /

I also think that many people come to development by the frontend door as it's more visual (as you said). And JS has a reputation for being cool, so they choose it to start.

 
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kaelscion

Kourtney is Vanilla JS because she seems to be boring as all get out. And Kim is Node because she gets more famous all the time but, other than her rabid followers, none of us really understand why or what, exactly, she has contributed to the world. πŸ˜‹πŸ˜‹πŸ˜‹

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kaelscion

And before any of you ask, I'm married to a woman who watches the show occasionally so it's NOT creepy that I can map Kardashian sisters to JS frameworks this quickly 😐😐😐😐😐

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deleteme deleteme

Elixir - 167 - 1.41%

These are rookie numbers, I gotta pump these numbers up! Challenge accepted.

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Ben Halpern

I feel like it wouldn’t be quite like this without Node. JS didn’t explode like this until Node made teaching full-stack JS so practical.

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li_chastina profile image

very interesting stats. I'd expect people to be eager to share their learnings in Golang considering Golang is relatively new...But not too odd since backend languages are underrepresented all together.

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rhymes

Yeah, backenders need to up their game

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li_chastina profile image

Well, the numbers here only represent quantities and not qualities, they don't mean much out of that context.

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rhymes

agreed

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kaelscion • Edited

I think that programming languages/frameworks don't follow a life cycle like other technology does. Some great languages never take off, other so-so languages refuse to die. From what I've seen this usually depends on who adopts a language and for what reason. COBOL, for instance, still runs strong because the right tech companies adopted it at the right time and are now too dependent on it to let it go 100%. If IBM never adopted it, or they move their old mainframes from it in the 70's, maybe COBOL dies soon after. Who knows?

I can say, though, that JS is huge because it's a niche language (hold your pitchforks and let me explain). Just because the niche is huge (the web's front end) doesn't make it any less so. If another language, like WebAssembly, gets the right endorsement or adoption at the right time, JS may become a marginal reference in a CS 101 book someday.

Really, we use the languages we like for as long as they prove useful to us. I remember when I found out cURL was written in Python 2.6, I thought it was pretty cool for a major tool to be so publicly written in the language I used (I know the first Google index bot was too). Now it's huge because it's so versatile and useful for data science. Ask most newcomers what Python is good for though and they will think data science is it. The landscape will look different in 5 years. The list above will have it's percentages change, and the top languages from industry lists will still probably be C, Java, JS, PHP, etc. But nobody can say that for certain. That's the fun of it I think!

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kaelscion

On another note, I have always been frustrated as to why cURL has never been ported up to 2.7 (at the very least). It makes CentOS kinda useless for any meaningful Python development in cloud applications and/or web. I mean, Docker is my new addiction so using Alpine or IBM Clear images renders that moot, but for non-Docker folks, does anybody know the story behind porting cURL to 2.7? I figure if Dropbox can upgrade their entire infrastructure from Python 2 to Python 3, perhaps a linux package manager can go up one version within the same Python distro? Just curious.

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miku86

Maybe everyone should just stop mixing up "correlation" and "causation" ;-)

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Nick Cinger

I think it's interesting, but also there's some grouping going on.

When we talk about server-side programming paradigms, we likely won't mention the language, as it tends to apply to all of them (barring exceptions).

When talking about frontend programming paradigms, there is no other language to talk about besides Javascript.

That said, there is no doubt that JS is the most widespread, but I wouldn't read too much into it.

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Jason Steinhauser

I hope to be adding some additional Elixir, F#, and Clojure articles to up those totals ;-)

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Jakob Christensen

Yes, please 😊

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Mark

A language like Go only has 3.3% of the language tags, which is very low compared to the real popularity of the language.

And Java is only at 3.2% here! It's arguable whether Java is still the most commonly used language or not, but it's definitely used a lot more than Go or Ruby are!

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Evaldas Buinauskas

Should've listed .NET as part of C#

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Jakob Christensen

... and F# is missing from the list.

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Boris Jamot ✊ /

You're, right, I forgot fsharp that has 22 articles on DEV, which is not so much.
I think you understood the big picture of this post which is: Javascript is ruling dev.to ! ;)

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Jakob Christensen

Yes. I will have to post some F# stuff to make up for that 😁

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Evaldas Buinauskas

I surely did. πŸ˜‰ This is very visible, but seeing aggregated numbers makes it more crystal clear ☺️

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Sandor Dargo

Thanks for this article. Now it makes complete sense that although I follow #python, #java and #cpp, still my feed is full of JS, though I would even ban it from my feed given my interests.

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Md Abu Taher

There will be nim soon.

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David J Eddy • Edited
PHP     725 6.11%

Rookie Numbers

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Juan F Gonzalez

For me is good because I was taught Back-end development all the time in my CS degree and I have grown to despise it, so everything I'm doing nowadays is Front-end development and I love JavaScript and everything related to it.

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Jeremy Ward πŸ˜ŽπŸ€“

No emberJS :`(

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Boris Jamot ✊ /

Ember.js : 23 posts

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Jeremy Ward πŸ˜ŽπŸ€“

Wow I may need to change that :)

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Sagar

As per you're statistics, if dev.to written in React and Node then chances that open source contribution will grow drastically.

I known frontend built in React.

Ruby = 7.24%
JavaScript = 56.36%

What do you think ??

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Rafael Ahrons

That numbers in # collumn is the count of total articles written in the # programming language or is something else? Because I've been watching #csharp and #dotnet and there is much more articles written.

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Boris Jamot ✊ /

Yes, it is the count of articles of the language, the 31 Oct 2018.
Maybe .NET's popularity has grown since...

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David Wickes

Time to write that Algol post I guess...

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Galdin Raphael

We need more people on here!

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William Britton

I think this chart is awesome as someone who wants to get into blogging, this gives me some insight into topics I should probably focus on and it seems there is enough content for JavaScript here.

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Jermaine

it seems there is enough content for JavaScript here.

I had a similar concern before getting into blogging earlier this year. Nothing should stop you from exploring other options. I did that by writing on Dart.

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Boris Jamot ✊ /

You're totally right, I forget it, although I'm also a SpringBoot dev...

spring : 37

springboot : 22

It's just crazy compared to the popularity of SpringBoot in big production apps !

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Michiel Hendriks

I'm note sure if spring boot is popular in big production apps. I think most spring boot based production apps are small, maybe medium.

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Boris Jamot ✊ /

I think that SpringBoot may be the new J2EE as we see many of J2EE app switching to it. But SpringBoot is also very well designed for medium app.

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Muhammed H. Alkan

Actually Elixir is more popular than Haskell, it's still functional.

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Saran Tanpituckpong • Edited

HTML is the best programming language.




<!-- Just a joke πŸ˜› -->

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jmscavaleiro

Well, I'm pretty impressed that have has such a low number of articles!

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Valentin Silvestre

Too many JS :(

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Jaime Rios

JavaScript is the LΓ­ngua Franca of the web so for me it makes sense and I'm relieved to know that this data reflects that.

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phoenixharoz

Awesome.

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Loopdeez

While I think everyone with eyes can admit that JavaScript/JS frameworks are highly popular- I unfortunately find myself reading less and less of Dev.to due to the lack of diversity