[stephenr]

They have a section on this very website, called "Ask HN". It's not uncommon for people to ask for opinions/input on tooling.

That also gives you more context, because it's answering your actual question, rather than trying to answer your own question with a bunch of vaguely related data.

It also handles the dependency issue. Someone asked why imagemagick is so popular, but its probably actually just a dependency for language-level bindings (e.g. php-imagick), not that people are using `convert` or `identify` directly on the CLI.

Heck, consider the case of front-end developers who have a toolset that depends on nodejs. They may never write any server side code, but if they follow recent trends they probably need nodejs for their css/js "toolchain" - the stats don't tell you that though. They just tell you that nodejs is installed a lot.