[munk-a]

I think the most useful popularity vector of a language is probably "What proportion of good programmers I interview will know a language" that vector would influence what language a company might chose to build a new product in in order to ensure they can find good developers to maintain it.

Actually a better question might be "What proportion of good programmers I interview will know a language in five years".

[justinpombrio]

That's going to vary wildly depending on who you interview, which is going to depend on what sort of thing your company does. A game studio is going to get people that know C and Lua with a fringe group that are excited about Rust, while a big enterprisey company is going to get Java and C# developers with a fringe group that are excited about F#. (Maybe these examples are all wrong, but you get the idea.)

[munk-a]

I absolutely agree, yea, and it's locality based... so up here in Vancouver it's really easy to find people familiar with AWS and system programmer types (Java/C++) along with the strong web development scene adding a lot of availability to react, node, a little bit of remaining angular.

But within that market it's further divided, if you're looking for non-game related Objective-C developers you'd probably be in trouble and so on...

It really is a super complex question, but that's the sort of ranking vector I'd be more interested as opposed to "How quickly do stackoverflow questions get accepted answers?" and I am under no illusion that it'd be super hard to measure.