[christophilus]

> One tag that stands out is the functional language Clojure; almost nobody expresses dislike for it, but it’s still among the most rapidly shrinking (based on question visits, it only started shrinking in the last year or so)

That's an interesting observation. Having learned Clojure this year without asking a single StackOverflow question, I don't think this means Clojure is shrinking. I suspect that Clojure's crazy good stability means no new questions are really required for core things.

Also, Clojure tends to not be anyone's first language, if Clojure Conj is any indication. Most Clojure developers I've ever met have been programming for > 10 years. Experienced programmers don't tend to ask as many "how do I do this in language X" questions.

[gozur88]

>Having learned Clojure this year without asking a single StackOverflow question, I don't think this means Clojure is shrinking. I suspect that Clojure's crazy good stability means no new questions are really required for core things.

That seems like wishful thinking. If new people are picking up the language there should be noob questions on StackOverflow no matter how stable the language is.

[threatofrain]

It's also shrinking on Github participation, which I don't think is good. Are you saying that Clojure is growing, but it's growing with people who feel like giving back less?

Meanwhile, Scala is skyrocketing. I would imagine that this is because Clojure somehow missed the big data race.

[christophilus]

I'm not making a judgement call about whether Clojure is growing or shrinking. Just saying that StackOverflow isn't a good gauge for the reasons I listed.

Github is a better gauge. I wasn't aware that it was trending downward. My impression was more that it was slowly accreting instead of following a sharp curve, which is just fine by me.

[saas_co_de]

I would guess that most active dislike of a language comes from being forced to use it for a job.

Some of the languages with really low negatives are probably only there because they are rarely used commercially so no one is being forced into using them.

JavaScript's standing is pretty amazing considering how widely used it is commercially and that everyone is forced to use it.