[hugofirth]

Man I was frustrated by this article. Despite it being on a subject matter I normally ignore, it lured me in with the promise to “dig into data publicly in a way that (so far) I haven’t seen anyone else do”.

I was expecting some novel analysis of in depth data scraped from GitHub APIs, or the results of a qualitative survey of big Java shops, or … something?

Instead what we got was a reposting of a few surface level stats pulled from other blog posts which have tolled the death of Java (or C++ or whatever) ad nauseum.

It’s as if the author started with a narrative and went searching for the line plots to justify it.

To be clear I don’t doubt the growth of Java amongst new learners is slowing down. Partly perhaps due to an image problem relative to other new languages, but likely also due to having somewhat saturated its “total addressable market” and not repositioning itself in new “markets” in the way that, say python has done.

But it’s still a great language for many categories of problem (e.g. high throughput live service) and has rich ecosystem. Build what you like with whatever tool is good for the job. Stop using bad stats to motivate your recent learning choices and just go build stuff :-)

[tuxone]

I agree 100%.

Each language shines for specific applications and the provided public data adds little value without clusterization per each application type.

Plus, GitHub is not representative of the real world. As an example, how much Cobol is versioned there compared to the number of LOC in production today?

Also, less new questions on SO may just be a symptom of a mature language instead of a decline.

This is an interesting topic that rarely gets addressed objectively.

[ghaff]

GitHub and SO may be relevant directionally for languages that have some material presence on those sites. It's not unreasonable to think there may be a decline though, for a language still at #3 or so, the headline somewhat oversells.

But, yes, there are definitely limitations to GitHub and SO data. You'd probably have to do some primary survey research of the audience in question--e.g. large enterprises--to get better numbers for that audience. And, even then, my experience with trying to get some sort of handle on the amount of C code out there years ago was that few people really have a great grasp on lines of code (? an imperfect measure in its own right) of various languages in use in their organizations.

[tuxone]

A better data source could be online job listings. With the correct considerations that data may give you some insight on tech trends.

[ghaff]

Possibly. I'd have to study the data sources to have an opinion. I could definitely see it being a source for languages that you wouldn't necessarily expect your average Python or Javascript developer to know or casually pick up--and therefore would be certain to be explicitly called out in a job ad.