Delphi Programming

and software in general.

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Dataists: Ranking the popularity of programming languages - YALPC

Yet Another Language Popularity Contest - Web site dataists had an article in december about the popularity of programming languages, using data from StackOverflow and GitHub to measure popularity. Delphi scored high on StackOverflow, but low on GitHub - which probably reflect on the SVN support in Delphi, making SVN more popular than Git for Delphi users. Note that the scales are by rank, and not by relative number of entries.

Posted by Lars Fosdal at 10:12
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5 comments:

  1. Olaf Monien06 January, 2011 15:40

    An interesting looking chart, but what value does it have? If I look at it as, and would have to decide about my next project's implementation language, then it says "take JavaScript".
    If I look a little closer then it maybe suggests one of the C languages or Java for my backend and leaves a choice of ruby, php, perl and python if I go web.
    Delphi would not even be worth looking at it because of it's rank. It is topped my many alternatives.

    But is this really true? Does looking at GIT Hub and StackOverflow that way make *any* sense at all?

    Does looking at the number of GIT hosted projects tell anything about success? Anything about useability for certain project targets?

    I'm not saying this YALPC is meaningless, but as a measure for decisions I doubt this is useful at all. If we would follow popularity indicators like this one, then there would have been never a chance for new kids on the block - and we were all still programming in Assembly...

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  2. Unknown06 January, 2011 16:42

    I don't see JavaScript on the chart. For that matter, I don't see Perl.

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  3. Unknown07 January, 2011 08:49

    I think you should put a link to the data source http://www.dataists.com/2010/12/ranking-the-popularity-of-programming-langauges/ in your article text as well (now the link is only in the image, which for many people is not clear).

    The source clearly explains the pros and cons of this kind of measurement, and also indicate that soms languages (Delphi, VimL, R) have a much weaker correlation.

    The comments to the data source are also very interesting reading.

    I'd love to see a broader comparison (there are many project hosters, as http://code.google.com/p/flossmole/downloads/list shows, but only few community sites - I think only StackOverflow/StackExchange and ExpertsExchange).

    --jeroen

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  4. Lars Fosdal07 January, 2011 09:47

    I updated the my blog entry with a link to the original article. I had put a link below the picture (and the picture itself also links) - but the bottom link didn't show for some reason.

    Peter - JS and Perl are on the upper right end of the scale.

    I agree, Olaf. There is little value in this, execept possibly the correlation between Delphi SVN support and less Git usage.

    Are those that use the languages at the upper right, all early adopters?

    One possible positive effect of such comparisons is that it expose us to new and lesser known languages, and perhaps also confirm that there still is life in some of the old languages (Fortran in the middle there, but where is Cobol?).

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  5. Eric09 January, 2011 07:54

    Lack of a free, hobbyist version also certainly plays a role in the lack of Delphi popularity in open-source repository, such a github, I don't think SVN explains the difference.
    Recent delphi projects aren't that commonplace even on repositories that support SVN such as googlecode, bitbucket, SF, etc.

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