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“Favourite” Programming Languages on Hacker News - Key take-aways

Rust is the most talked-about language

2 327 stories – the highest volume

57 212 total points – the highest aggregate karma

Go comes a very close second in volume (2 259 stories) and total score (45 511).

Python and JavaScript still dominate discussion but are edged out by Rust & Go this year.

Smaller but passionate followings

Lua & Erlang generate the highest average score per story, indicating highly-engaged niche audiences.

Swift and Elixir also punch above their weight on a per-story basis.

Classic staples (C++, Java, Ruby, PHP) remain active but draw less relative excitement.

Quick ranking by story count

Rust – 2 327

Go – 2 259

Python – 2 029

JavaScript – 1 927

Highest average karma per story

Lua – 51.8

Erlang – 36.5

Swift – 29.3

Elixir – 25.9

Rust – 24.6

Interpretation: Rust and Go are currently the “favourite” languages on Hacker News by sheer attention and total karma, while Lua and Erlang have smaller but very enthusiastic communities

- Next time any Rust supporter telling you Rust is not popular on HN or Ada gets mentioned a lot of Zig gets similar attention as Rust. You may point them to this post.

[heresie-dabord]

> Rust and Go are currently the “favourite” languages on Hacker News by sheer attention and total karma

Of course, the statement must be consumed with a few NaCl because frequency of discussion (especially within an obsessive subgroup) does not represent effective implementation. Even less so do "attention and karma".

By actual work being done and bills paid and new, non-trivial projects begun, some ordering of Python, ECMAscript (JS), Java, C, C++, C# would be good Family Feud-style ranked bets.

[codetrotter]

> frequency of discussion (especially within an obsessive subgroup) does not represent effective implementation

I asked the chat tool to count how many times each different programming language is mentioned in different “Show HN” post titles.

If the tool is accurate, it seems that the results diverge somewhat from what you are implying.

    language post_count
    Python 3117
    JavaScript 2545
    Go 2178
    Rust 1251
    TypeScript 607
    Java 605
    Ruby 531
    PHP 514
    Swift 433
    Clojure 229
    Elixir 173
    Haskell 142
    Kotlin 128
    Scala 122
    Lua 110
    C++ 101
    Erlang 61
    Dart 45
    Perl 35

[tmtvl]

No Lisp? On HN!? There has to be something wrong here.

[codetrotter]

I think this is a result of the strategy that the AI chose for picking languages. I saw when it was planning what to do it said that it was going to use a regex against the post titles. Probably it only included the specific languages above in that regex. Leaving some languages out. Which should still mean it hopefully has accurate numbers for the languages it chose to look for, but it might be missing several other more or less widely mentioned languages.

If I ask it specifically to count how many Show HN posts mention Lisp or Scheme in the title, it says there’s a total of 370 mentioning one or the other of those.

[heresie-dabord]

If we were to do a careful analysis to control for the bias of one site, we would consider more sources, for example:

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

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology

[navalino]

but this tool only analyzes hn.. why it need to consider other site? of course it can different

[cmovq]

One thing I noticed is that projects written in Rust always mention it the title (there’s one on the front page right now), compared to other languages that don’t. That probably adds to the numbers

[encom]

The Crossfit of programming.

[pclmulqdq]

Go projects often do the same thing.

[pcthrowaway]

I suspect something went wrong here with Typescript not being mentioned as a favourite. My own recollection is that when discussions of favourite programming languages come up, Typescript is often one of the top contenders, and it's extremely rare for people to prefer Javascript of all languages.

Perhaps this is folding Javascript in with Typescript.

[baq]

People don’t talk about typescript. They’re busy getting shit done.

I say this as someone who likes Rust very much and gets paid for Typescript.

[winrid]

They're busy figuring out which "severe" npm warnings are actually severe :P

[baq]

Note I didn’t say I like typescript, only rust ;)

[saghm]

Being talked about doesn't imply it's positive though, right? If tons of people started posting stores and comments complaining about something, it sounds like it would inflate the numbers for it as well.

[WhereIsTheTruth]

lowest average, yet ranks so high, wich mean it gets helped by some secret algorithm ;)

if you browse HN daily, you start to notice patterns, there is a _real_ bias towards rust, even more obvious when you dig at the YC companies and what they seem to promote