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GitHub Commits Reveal The Top 'Weekend Programming' Languages (medium.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Google "developer advocate" Felipe Hoffa has determined the top "weekend programming languages," those which see the biggest spike in commit activity on the weekends. "Clearly 2016 was a year dedicated to play with functional languages, up and coming paradigms, and scripting 3d worlds," he writes, revealing that the top weekend programming languages are:

Rust, Glsl, D, Haskell, Common Lisp, Kicad, Emacs Lisp, Lua, Scheme, Julia, Elm, Eagle, Racket, Dart, Nsis, Clojure, Kotlin, Elixir, F#, Ocaml

Earlier this week another data scientist calculated ended up with an entirely different list by counting the frequency of each language's tag in StackOverflow questions. But Hoffa's analysis was performed using Google's BigQuery web service, and he's also compiled a list of 2016's least popular weekend languages -- the ones people seem to prefer using at the office rather than in their own free time.

Nginx, Matlab, Processing, Vue, Fortran, Visual Basic, Objective-C++, Plsql, Plpgsql, Web Ontology Language, Smarty, Groovy, Batchfile, Objective-C, Powershell, Xslt, Cucumber, Hcl, Puppet, Gcc Machine Description

What's most interesting is the changes over time. In the last year Perl has become more popular than Java, PHP, and ASP as a weekend programming language. And Rust "used to be a weekday language," Hoffa writes, but it soon also grew more popular for Saturdays and Sunday. Meanwhile, "The more popular Go grows, the more it settles as a weekday language," while Puppet "is the champion of weekday coders." Ruby on the other hand, is "slowly leaving the week and embracing the weekend."

Hoffa is also a long-time Slashdot reader who analyzed one billion files on GitHub last summer to determine whether they'd been indented with spaces or tabs. But does this new list resonate with anybody? What languages are you using for your weekend coding projects?

2 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. What brand of hammer? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    What brand of hammer do you use for your weekend carpentry projects?

    Seriously.

    Programming languages do not matter. Any program can be written in any language. Programming languages are as interchangeable as hammers.

  2. Weekend? As in fart with, not work with? by Snotnose · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Learned Java on my own a couple years ago, but have never used it in a professional environment. Do a lot of Python on my own. Do C/perl/bash/some C++ at work.

    Love Python, Java is OK.

    Then again, I've never used github neither personally nor professionally, I'm gonna guess these results are biased heavily towards github users, the rest of us (Perforce for me) are completely left out.

    / several years ago we were writing a new test suite
    // I wanted Python, most others wanted Perl
    /// Boss said "3,000 engineers here know Perl, you know Python. Wanna support 3,000 engineers?"
    //// bummer, but he had a damned valid point