What Programming Language Do People Speak Well Of?
I usually don’t write blog entries that are merely pointers to someone else’s blog entries, but I’m making an exception this time. A blogger named Lukas Biewald, in a blog called/of Dolores Labs, wrote an entry called The Programming Language With The Happiest Users.
He measured Twitter “tweets” that mention certain programming languages, and ascertained which were positive. I’m particularly interested because Lisp came in second place.
Interpreting this as “the programming langauge with the happiest users” depends on several tacit assumptions that seem dubious at best. We don’t know that the people writing these comments are actually users. The number of tweets sent about a language is not uncorreleated with the langauge; I bet there are fewer COBOL programmers using Twitter than Perl programmers. Not everybody tweets about how much they like or dislike their langauge as much as everybody else. He knows this and mentions some of these problems at the end of the post, so I’m not saying this to criticize him.
Yes, the title of the blog post is sort of misleading, but written to get the attention of readers. I cannot criticize him for that either, since I do the same thing. Sometimes it backfires; a lot of people seem to have seen my post named “Why Did M.I.T. Switch from Scheme to Python” without getting my points, which were (1) they didn’t make a high-level decision to switch languages, but rather this fell out as an end consequence of decisions that had nothing to do with languages, and (2) this is only for the freshman core courses, not the whole curriculum.
It’s hard to draw any hard and meaningful and useful conclusions from this research, but I still find it interesting and entertaining.
September 4th, 2009 at 10:07 am
I looked at this a couple of times a few years ago using Google instead of Twitter …
http://bluebones.net/2004/04/programming-languages-that-are-loved/
http://bluebones.net/2005/04/does-anyone-love-java/
September 4th, 2009 at 10:56 am
As a language sinks into unpopularity or irrelevance, only those who love the language have to use it, and the “happiness” rating goes up.
So we can predict that languages will have happier users as they are disused, and unhappier users as they are mandated at school or in the workplace.
Outliers would be interesting to study, but a mere measure of “happiness” without correlation to use is not telling much.
September 4th, 2009 at 11:18 am
This also seems like it might be biased depending on where there are high concentrations of usage; in the US, for instance, people often come across as happy and enthusiastic when writing, even if they’re not, while in the UK and Ireland, well, we love to moan about everything (there have been actual studies on this), even if just for effect.
September 4th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
I believe there is no such thing as bad publicity except. As long as people care enough to mention lisp even in negative context there is still hope. Even annoying trolls could teach you something as witnessed yesterday by the annoying ruby guy in cll who rewrites cl code in ruby, and which forced me to use the optional return value of gethash that I’ve never thought of before. Having many lispers tweets seems that language use is growing. Having those users being happy to mention it in positive context is even better.