[christophilus]

You're almost certainly right that their sample sizes are too small, especially in the upper age brackets. I suspect it's hard to find a lot of 55+ year old programmers who are willing to do silly things like take a HackerRank poll. Given the industry stats, it's fairly hard to find 55+ year old programmers, period.

> people actually like JavaScript. Wait, people do actually like C++?!?

Yep to both. I actually don't mind the latest versions of JavaScript. I don't like C++ at all, but have done professional work in it alongside people who thought it was a great language.

> Why is Ruby, which is all about programmer happiness so far down?

Programmer happiness is subjective (as evidenced by my previous remark and by the love/hate you see expressed for JavaScript, Go, Clojure, etc). Personally, I'm not a Ruby fan. I don't like the syntax. I vastly prefer composable functions to Ruby's "blocks". I find that most Ruby code I've worked with is too heavy on OOP abstractions and would be much clearer if expressed functionally. I could go on, but the point is, it's subjective.