RedMonk Ranks Top Programming Languages Over Time - and Considers Ditching Its 'Stack Overflow' Metric (redmonk.com) 36
The developer-focused analyst firm RedMonk releases twice-a-year rankings of programming language popularity. This week they also released a handy graph showing the movement of top 20 languages since 2012. Their current rankings for programming language popularity...
1. JavaScript
2. Python
3. Java
4. PHP
5. C#
6. TypeScript
7. CSS
8. C++
9. Ruby
10. C
The chart shows that over the years the rankings really haven't changed much (other than a surge for TypeScript and Python, plus a drop for Ruby). JavaScript has consistently been #1 (except in two early rankings, where it came in behind Java). And in 2020 Java finally slipped from #2 down to #3, falling behind... Python. Python had already overtaken PHP for the #3 spot in 2017, pushing PHP to a steady #4. C# has maintained the #5 spot since 2014 (though with close competition from both C++ and CSS). And since 2021 the next four spots have been held by Ruby, C, Swift, and R.
The only change in the current top 20 since the last ranking "is Dart dropping from a tie with Rust at 19 into sole possession of 20," writes RedMonk co-founder Stephen O'Grady. "In the decade and a half that we have been ranking these languages, this is by far the least movement within the top 20 that we have seen. While this is to some degree attributable to a general stasis that has settled over the rankings in recent years, the extraordinary lack of movement is likely also in part a manifestation of Stack Overflow's decline in query volume..." The arrival of AI has had a significant and accelerating impact on Stack Overflow, which comprises one half of the data used to both plot and rank languages twice a year... Stack Overflow's value from an observational standpoint is not what it once was, and that has a tangible impact, as we'll see....
As that long time developer site sees fewer questions, it becomes less impactful in terms of driving volatility on its half of the rankings axis, and potentially less suggestive of trends moving forward... [W]e're not yet at a point where Stack Overflow's role in our rankings has been deprecated, but the conversations at least are happening behind the scenes.
"The veracity of the Stack Overflow data is increasingly questionable," writes RedMonk's research director: When we use Stack Overflow for programming language rankings we measure how many questions are asked using specific programming language tags... While other pieces, like Matt Asay's AI didn't kill Stack Overflow are right to point out that the decline existed before the advent of AI coding assistants, it is clear that the usage dramatically decreased post 2023 when ChatGPT became widely available. The number of questions asked are now about 10% what they were at Stack Overflow's peak.
"RedMonk is continuing to evaluate the quality of this analysis," the research director concludes, arguing "there is value in long-lived data, and seeing trends move over a decade is interesting and worthwhile. On the other hand, at this point half of the data feeding the programming language rankings is increasingly stale and of questionable value on a going-forward basis, and there is as of now no replacement public data set available.
"We'll continue to watch and advise you all on what we see with Stack Overflow's data."
1. JavaScript
2. Python
3. Java
4. PHP
5. C#
6. TypeScript
7. CSS
8. C++
9. Ruby
10. C
The chart shows that over the years the rankings really haven't changed much (other than a surge for TypeScript and Python, plus a drop for Ruby). JavaScript has consistently been #1 (except in two early rankings, where it came in behind Java). And in 2020 Java finally slipped from #2 down to #3, falling behind... Python. Python had already overtaken PHP for the #3 spot in 2017, pushing PHP to a steady #4. C# has maintained the #5 spot since 2014 (though with close competition from both C++ and CSS). And since 2021 the next four spots have been held by Ruby, C, Swift, and R.
The only change in the current top 20 since the last ranking "is Dart dropping from a tie with Rust at 19 into sole possession of 20," writes RedMonk co-founder Stephen O'Grady. "In the decade and a half that we have been ranking these languages, this is by far the least movement within the top 20 that we have seen. While this is to some degree attributable to a general stasis that has settled over the rankings in recent years, the extraordinary lack of movement is likely also in part a manifestation of Stack Overflow's decline in query volume..." The arrival of AI has had a significant and accelerating impact on Stack Overflow, which comprises one half of the data used to both plot and rank languages twice a year... Stack Overflow's value from an observational standpoint is not what it once was, and that has a tangible impact, as we'll see....
As that long time developer site sees fewer questions, it becomes less impactful in terms of driving volatility on its half of the rankings axis, and potentially less suggestive of trends moving forward... [W]e're not yet at a point where Stack Overflow's role in our rankings has been deprecated, but the conversations at least are happening behind the scenes.
"The veracity of the Stack Overflow data is increasingly questionable," writes RedMonk's research director: When we use Stack Overflow for programming language rankings we measure how many questions are asked using specific programming language tags... While other pieces, like Matt Asay's AI didn't kill Stack Overflow are right to point out that the decline existed before the advent of AI coding assistants, it is clear that the usage dramatically decreased post 2023 when ChatGPT became widely available. The number of questions asked are now about 10% what they were at Stack Overflow's peak.
"RedMonk is continuing to evaluate the quality of this analysis," the research director concludes, arguing "there is value in long-lived data, and seeing trends move over a decade is interesting and worthwhile. On the other hand, at this point half of the data feeding the programming language rankings is increasingly stale and of questionable value on a going-forward basis, and there is as of now no replacement public data set available.
"We'll continue to watch and advise you all on what we see with Stack Overflow's data."
ObTC (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, I probably wouldn't hire anyone who listed CSS (or HTML) as one of their programming languages.
Re:ObTC (Score:5, Funny)
The problem with listing HTML and CSS ... (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
100% agree
Re: (Score:2)
I probably wouldn't hire anyone who listed CSS (or HTML) as one of their programming languages.
I would send them a programming exercise.
"This task is to be completed using only the following programming language which we have chosen from your profile:
CSS. Your solution must use only CSS; no Java, no Javascript, etc."
Assignment:
Write the program fizzbuz.
Program Specifications:
When started the program asks the user to input a Starting number and then an Ending number. Both inputs should be integers.
Aft
Re:ObTC (Score:4, Informative)
I asked Gemini, Claude and Copilot, and each had no problem implementing FizzBuzz in CSS. You must be new to this whole coding thing.
Re: ObTC (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Indeed. It is actually difficult to construct a useful language that is not Turing complete. It is really a very low bar.
Re: (Score:2)
It's actually quite easy for a DSL: just don't give it unbounded loops.
Re: (Score:3)
If CSS is on there then HTML and English might as well be too.
"Our new back-end database? Not a single SQL statement in our code base, it's 100% written in Icelandic."
Re: (Score:2)
It actually is, though god help anyone who tries to use it for something productive beyond decorating web pages. But yes, you could write an entire app in it. It would just.. be a terribly confusing hell to do so.
Does it age like fine wine or like milk? (Score:2)
25 years of useless data = Useful Information?
Ruby called, it wants its past glory back (Score:3)
everything was going to be Ruby in 2018.
ECMCA, W3C, and ANSI all absent (Score:2)
The computing field lapsed into a nostalgia mode over a decade ago, letting programming languages, frameworks, web stack (html, css, JavaScript) stagnate instead of innovating.
This nostalgia is not just reverting back to Fortran and punch cards, it's keeping the technological status quo in place for the large part of computing. Innovative products, languages, frameworks, etc. come, get hyped and fail to replace the old time leaders.
ECMA, W3C, and ANSI are making incremental changes and gold plating the te
Re:ECMCA, W3C, and ANSI all absent (Score:4, Insightful)
The computing field lapsed into a nostalgia mode over a decade ago, letting programming languages, frameworks, web stack (html, css, JavaScript) stagnate instead of innovating.
This nostalgia is not just reverting back to Fortran and punch cards, it's keeping the technological status quo in place for the large part of computing. Innovative products, languages, frameworks, etc. come, get hyped and fail to replace the old time leaders.
Nostalgia mode? For one, take a look at any modern web framework (e.g. Angular). It doesn't look a whole lot like it did a decade ago. Whether it is useful change or not may be debatable, but it definitely hasn't stagnated. I have had personal experience updating an old Spring Boot (Java) application and there were lots and lots of changes to be done (we vastly underestimated the complexity... probably because we had assumed it wasn't all that different).
That's at a framework level. At a language level, yes things "stagnate" - features evolve slowly (but even C++ is getting new features regularly). This is for a couple of reasons. First, it isn't as if the "old school" were dumb. They created languages that were useful at solving problems and an enormous amount of code was created (and the experience to go along with it). The existing code is still useful and rewriting it would be ridiculously expensive and a waste of time - so it doesn't get rewritten - and "stagnates". FORTRAN still exists because an awful lot of useful code was written in it (FORTRAN excels at efficient numerical computations and it is hard to do better).
If what you are proposing is that every few years, we start using some "innovative" new language, you will ultimately get a lot of churn, create training problems for new programmers (oh, I now have to figure out how to use language X). If your project is a decade old, you'll now have 3-4 languages in the project because each new functionality needed to written in the new cool language. Or do you want to rewrite every 3 years working code to be in the new cool language?
(My personal theory is that there is very little good code that is less than 10 years old. It takes that amount of time - of continuous use - to find and correct the serious problems in anything remotely complex. It has to stagnate to become good. Occasionally a genius will come along with good code faster than that, but that is rare.)
Re: (Score:1)
Ordered by compute time? (Score:5, Funny)
Have to fill up those clock cycles with something (Score:2)
Are the languages ranked by clock cycles required to perform a specific computation?
We have to fill up those clock cycles with something, otherwise why would people upgrade as long as the hardware still works?
The LLM companies (Score:3)
should be less greedy and give back a little - Provide some stats on query metrics.
TS + JS (Score:1)
Full chart (Score:5, Informative)
https://redmonk.com/sogrady/fi... [redmonk.com]
That's the full graph, showing how each language they tracked rated on both GitHub and Stack Overflow.
I find it interesting that D is slightly ahead of Visual Basic on GitHub and significantly ahead on Stack Overflow. And everyone has heard of Visual Basic, but it's hard to find people who have even heard of D.
What does that even mean? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Top" ranked, apparently, i.e. nothing. "Top used" is not a good metric unless you look for safery in numbers. If you do that, please get out of coding, you are incompetent. "Top performing" clearly would rank differently. "Best to code toy examples in" is vastly different from "best to code large systems in". "Top in security issues" would probably go to PHP, but is more a statement about coders than languages.
Often, "Top lists" are just bullshit. This is one such case. Essentially asking "what is better, spoon or fork?", when in reality, it is about the right tool for the job and that varies vastly.
Re: (Score:3)
The only useful metrics would be "Total corporate spending per language", "number of professional developers per language", "number of autocomplete prompts completed per language" or "Average ROI per musd invested per language". In other words, does it help generate profits. All other stats are vanity or just showing that the documentation of the language is inadequate (requiring SO searches).
Re: (Score:2)
Even that one is bad, because "profits" are not strategic in an evolving field. Well, if you do not mind getting hired now and being unemployable in 10 years, then "profits" may do it for you.
"Top" is not "best" (Score:2)
JS is bad (Score:2)
What a great way to build a moat.Google thanks the OSS community, you're no longer needed. Take a vacation!