Analyzing StackOverflow Users' Programming Language Leanings

AlexDomo writes to point out this statistical breakdown of the programming languages represented at StackOverflow. "Suprisingly, JavaScript turned out to be the most 'over-represented' language on StackOverflow, by quite a long way at 294% [where "a representation of 100% means that the SO tag count is aligned exactly with the TIOBE language index"]. Could this also be because programming JavaScript is generally quite difficult and will result in people seeking help more often? Following this was C# (which I had expected to be number 1), at 153%. After this, PHP, Ruby and Python were basically fairly balanced at around 100%. The most 'under-represented' major language would definitely be C at 11%. Three other major languages which seemed to be a bit under-represented, below 50%, were C++, Java and Objective-C. For details of the method used and the full results, refer to the original article." One of the attached comments makes an interesting point about the difficulty in divining meaning from such statistics, though.

Comments

C Programmers

[paithuk]

All the C programmers are busy over at bufferoverflow.com

It's all a matter of perspective

[damn_registrars]

They clearly tried to manage their data using javascript, a big mistake from the get-go. If they'd have taken the same data and parsed with with Perl, they would have found that all the questions came from Python and Ruby people. Had they done it in C++, all the questions would have come from C# users. Had they done it in PL/SQL they would have found that the questions all came from rounding errors.

And if they had done it in assembly, they would have found there were no questions at all...