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Is Python Really the Fastest-Growing Programming Language? (stackoverflow.blog)

An anonymous reader quotes Stack Overflow Blog: In this post, we'll explore the extraordinary growth of the Python programming language in the last five years, as seen by Stack Overflow traffic within high-income countries. The term "fastest-growing" can be hard to define precisely, but we make the case that Python has a solid claim to being the fastest-growing major programming language... June 2017 was the first month that Python was the most visited [programming language] tag on Stack Overflow within high-income nations. This included being the most visited tag within the US and the UK, and in the top 2 in almost all other high income nations (next to either Java or JavaScript). This is especially impressive because in 2012, it was less visited than any of the other 5 languages, and has grown by 2.5-fold in that time. Part of this is because of the seasonal nature of traffic to Java. Since it's heavily taught in undergraduate courses, Java traffic tends to rise during the fall and spring and drop during the summer.

Does Python show a similar growth in the rest of the world, in countries like India, Brazil, Russia and China? Indeed it does. Outside of high-income countries Python is still the fastest growing major programming language; it simply started at a lower level and the growth began two years later (in 2014 rather than 2012). In fact, the year-over-year growth rate of Python in non-high-income countries is slightly higher than it is in high-income countries... We're not looking to contribute to any "language war." The number of users of a language doesn't imply anything about its quality, and certainly can't tell you which language is more appropriate for a particular situation. With that perspective in mind, however, we believe it's worth understanding what languages make up the developer ecosystem, and how that ecosystem might be changing. This post demonstrated that Python has shown a surprising growth in the last five years, especially within high-income countries.

The post was written by Stack Overflow data scientist David Robinson, who notes that "I used to program primarily in Python, though I have since switched entirely to R."

2 of 254 comments (clear)

  1. Because of inclusion with visual studio 2017 by Billly+Gates · · Score: 4, Informative

    For those in Linux land you maybe surprised but visual studio is now free with the community edition. It also includes Python and R with win64 optimized versions of idle and Cython.

    Many people on Windows are wondering what it is since it's a huge section in the installer. This is probably what is causing the boost

  2. Re:It's a requirement for a lot of things now by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Informative

    Hopefully something which doesn't make so much importance out of whitespace will be next.

    OhyeahliketheEnglishlanguageandprettymucheverynaturallanguageoutthere.

    That's a very stupid thing to say since the argument is not over single spaces, but over using some number of spaces instead of punctuation. If natural languages worked that way, it would be a nightmare. We have one space, and we have an indent, and that's it, especially since double-spacing has died with typewriters.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"