Suppose I want to compare Java and C#, and am interesting in how much development (or new development) is performed using these languages. Where is a good site to find this?
Edit - Also interesting is to compare, say, CLR to JVM.
Funny how Java "wins" when looking at the Google Code statistics only.
AndiDog
2010-10-22 17:41:08
+1, although that's probably a better measure of how much online discussion a language has. They have some non-net metrics (like books sold), but that still IMHO overemphasises new fad languages. For example, there is *tons* of Fortran and Cobol development going on, but you won't really see it there because Fortran and Cobol programmers don't tend to hang out on the web asking each other questions, they don't develop a lot of web apps, and they've had all the books they need for decades.
T.E.D.
2010-10-22 17:41:10
A:
Trends on indeed.com can give you a general idea. This basically uses keywords in online job postings, so of course it's not completely accurate.
AaronLS
2010-10-22 17:33:13
A:
You could compare the number of questions tagged with the relevant language on Stack Overflow:
C++: 45056 Java: 73468 .Net: 55664 C#: 117123
Of course, that's over the past couple of years. Maybe someone could whip up a little page that tracks the number of questions posted per day...
CanSpice
2010-10-22 17:34:13
That's not fair, Java is a language and platform. .NET is a platform. You'd have to include at least c# and vb.net as well.
Giovanni Galbo
2010-10-22 17:35:47
The OP asked about Java and .net. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to create URLs for any other tag they choose. I even threw in C++ for free!
CanSpice
2010-10-22 17:43:39
It's not fair on another axis: I ask questions here about the technologies I understand the least, not the ones I use the most. By this measure, people use multithreading 5 times more than if-statements.
Ken
2010-10-22 17:43:48
That's true. Every metric you can come up with has different caveats (see T.E.D's comment on another answer here for how langpop.com's metric is potentially misleading). Like any metric, you need to know what's wrong with it in order to interpret it.
CanSpice
2010-10-22 17:54:30
+2
A:
I think TIOBE's Index base its popularity ranking on some sort of activity indicator.
Pablo Santa Cruz
2010-10-22 17:36:01
+6
A:
In my opinion, the TIOBE index is the most popular, most referenced (and probably most accurate) comparison of programming languages.
But note how it gets created:
The ratings are calculated by counting hits of the most popular search engines.
and
Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.
AndiDog
2010-10-22 17:36:02
TIOBE is the "most popular"? Where do I go to find out the relative popularity of popularity-measuring websites? :-)
Ken
2010-10-22 18:06:12
@Ken: That's why I said "in my opinion". I read a lot of programming-related RSS feeds and articles, and I think TIOBE is definitely the most well-known and quoted index.
AndiDog
2010-10-22 18:12:19
A:
And another answer: Just search on stackoverflow for the programming language's tag and compare the number of questions in the result.
That might give you a good impression, too, although you must know that it searches all 1017148 (and counting) questions instead of just questions of the, say, last 12 months. And it might as well include dumb closed questions for which the correct answer would have been OMG RTFM.
AndiDog
2010-10-22 17:46:17
+1
A:
You can't get better than Craigslist! It measures successful (i.e., funded) projects, both new and old:
The downside is that it only measures the instantaneous number; there's no trending (you'd have to sample for a few weeks). It's also hard to tell whether it will be skewed towards languages that are more popular or languages which require more developers.
Seth
2010-10-22 18:23:42