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."

Comments

Who cares?

[fnj]

Humph. Who in hell cares? I personally enjoy programming in python, but I certainly make such choices based on whether or not something is "popular".

Re:Who cares?

[ShanghaiBill]

Popularity matters.
1. If a language is unpopular, there may be good reasons. Examples: Ada, Modula-2.
2. Popular languages have a community of users, so you don't just get more questions on Stackoverflow, you also get more answers.
3. Popular language have more libraries, frameworks, and run on my platforms.
4. If a language is popular, you can get a job writing code in it.

Re:not looking to contribute to any "language war"

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not a racist, but whitespace having any sort of significance is pants-on-head retarded.

Python is the Most Troublesome

[blavallee]

Traffic to Stack Overflow is an indication of people having issues with Python. Not it's popularity!
Traffic for high-income countries (US/UK) is misleading, since they are using this troublesome language more often. Non-English speaking countries don't want to use it, due to the default ASCII character set.

Seems the researches need to understand how Stack Overflow is used before making such a misleading statement.
A higher score on Stack Overflow Trends would indicate the inadequacies of the language.
More visits indicate the level of frustration, not the languages popularity.

GitHut tells a different story.

Re: not looking to contribute to any "language war

[Entrope]

People complain about semantic whitespace in Python because that's a pants-on-head stupid detail to make people pay attention to. There are enough things that need attention that invisible characters shouldn't be one of them.

Re:It's a requirement for a lot of things now

[drinkypoo]

If you use a good modern editor like Microsoft Code, Atom, Brackets, or the bazillion other electron node.js based and not Vi or Emacs it will indent for you.

That does not solve the problem of copy and pasting code samples, and losing the formatting information. This is exactly why we have punctuation in written language. You can discard the formatting entirely and still make sense of the content. This is also exactly why using indentation to denote control flow is an idiot move which should have been permitted to die with punch cards. Once upon a time, it was actually a convenient convention. Today, it is purely inconvenient. Once that information is lost, it is gone forever. If control flow is denoted with punctuation, you can simply feed the code to an autoindenter, but no such thing can be created for python. The best an IDE can do is assist you with indentation while you write, it can never restore lost indentation.

This problem is older than computing, and so is the solution. That anyone would create a language which discards this basic tenet of modern language technology is pathetic, and that anyone would defend that decision is doubly so.

Unix of today is compromised by users and developers who do not understand it. On the one hand we have the proliferation of python, created by people who apparently want to turn back the clock to a time when mainframes and minicomputers dominated, and you had to enter code and data in the correct column. And on the other, we have the proliferation of systemd, created by someone who has forgotten all the lessons of the immediate past. And thus, Unix is doomed to be endlessly and poorly reimplemented by people who do not understand it.