[jarpadat]

It’s an interesting conjecture but I don’t think the data makes a compelling case. When you compare 2 points in time you have a lot of alternative hypotheses, like the 2016 languages just being historically unpopular for some reason. A better support is a cohort analysis where we see languages start green/liked and transition to brown/disliked over their lifecycle.

The real difficulty though, is addressing the alternative hypothesis that language design improves over time. This is obviously the view of language designers or else they wouldn’t make languages.

In that case, you would see the languages turn brown in your analysis, and even in more robust cohort analysis. But it would not be because of a honeymoon bias, it would be because you don’t want to use a horse-drawn carriage if you could use an automobile.

[visarga]

Different decades have different applications, hardware and trade-offs. So popular languages could be just overfit to the current epoch. It doesn't mean there is always progress, could be just change.