[feniv]

For comparison:

TIOBE Index - https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

    1. Java
    2. C
    3. Python
    4. C++
    5. C#
    6. Visual Basic .NET
    7. JavaScript
    8. PHP
    9. Objective-C
    10. SQL

Language popularity on Github: https://octoverse.github.com/projects.html https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/

    1. JavaScript
    2. Java
    3. Python
    4. PHP
    5. C++
    6. C#
    7. TypeScript
    8. Shell
    9. C
    10. Ruby

StackOverflow Developer Survey https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology

    1. JavaScript
    2. HTML/CSS
    3. SQL
    4. Python
    5. Java
    6. Bash/Shell/PowerShell
    7. C#
    8. PHP
    9/10 C++ / TypeScript (varies between surveys)

[segmondy]

  1. Java 
  2. Javascript
  3. Python
  4. C#
  5. C++
  6. PHP
  7. C
  8. HTML/CSS
  9. SQL
  10. Shell
  11. Visual Basic / Typescript
  12. Objective C / Ruby

The above 3 lists merged.

[kyriakos]

honest question: why so much difference ?

[moksly]

It’s rather hard to score programming languages isn’t it? Especially in any form that’s generally meaningful.

If you look at HN you’d think Go and Rust were actually very popular. If I look at the job agents for my country though, there has been one job listing Go and Rust in 2019 and that was under “nice to have” on a C++ job at Google. On the flip-side of this, if you looked at my local job market the list would only contain JAVA, C# and PHP. Well and JavaScript, but that’s typically in the “nice to have” section because no one uses it full stack and it’s easy to learn. If you looked in your area it might be Ruby and Swift.

Python always have massive stats, but around here 80% of the Python jobs aren’t for CS majors but rather for mathematicians and political scientists.

I wonder what these lists are even for. Some of the best paying programming jobs are for COBOL and it’s never in the top 10, if it’s even in the top 100.

[ThrowawayR2]

It's an IEEE† publication ("Our default weighting is optimized for the typical Spectrum reader, ..."), my guess would be that their audience is weighted heavily towards EEs/Comp. Eng./embedded systems types and more research oriented professionals.

† Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers

[ksec]

I guess it depends on the Domain. For example if you look at Ruby in Non Web Development it would be literally mid to bottom of the list. But if you look at Web, Ruby is constantly in Top 10.

And if you look at Combine list, C and C++ seems to be doing extremely well, but scaling down to specially Web again, C and C++ isn't even Top 20.

[gravypod]

Different sample sets and age distributions. I'd assume many Enterprise-y devs don't have a history on GitHub.

[weare138]

These type of "top/best/most popular" programming languages lists are usually inaccurate. It's a subjective question that has a slew of variables that skew the results. Like Javascript, for example, is always in the top 10, usually in the top 5, languages but being the only language we have for front end web development and the popularity of web apps of course a crapton of developers are using JS now. That doesn't mean JS is superior to less popular languages or that the majority of JS devs use JS because it's better. We just currently don't have a choice at this time when it comes to web development. Is JS popular because it's the better language or are we just stuck using it out of necessity which drives up it's perceived popularity? There's no way to tell with these types of lists and honestly I think the latter is true with JS.

[coldtea]

So much difference? For such a fuzzy topic those are incredibly similar. Ignore the ranking (for all you know #1 could mean 10M users and #8 means 9M users, e.g. an insignificant difference anyway) and consider the top-10 as an (unranked) set of the most popular languages.

Those then are more or less the same in all those sources!

[closeparen]

There are a lot of different communities within software; it depends on which ones you consider.