Slashdot Mirror
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.
I'm guess you've never actually used Pascal before? (either that or you've never used C).
There are some glaring superficial differences between Pascal and C, and thats about it. I've converted 1000s of lines of Pascal to C with very little effort, the structure can stay _exactly_ the same, just fix the blocks and do some standard find/replace. Try converting BASIC to Pascal or C and get back to me.
Background is similar to GP, learned everything in Pascal, including the old school Mac Toolbox (all Pascal), then one day everything new had to be C, you had to figure it out yourself. Not a big deal though- very similar...