Programming language popularity - Stack Overflow

There are many ways to compare the popularity of programming languages. None of them is perfect.

Let's look at one of those imperfect comparisions: Tags on StackOverflow

That page shows the number of questions asked marked with the specific tags.

Our assumption is that the language with the more questions is more popular.

The limitations are:

  • It is a total since the establishment of StackOverflow on September 15, 2008. Languages released since then had less time to accumulate questions.
  • On the other hand it does not include questions that were asked (somewhere) before StackOverflow opened.
  • Some languages might have other resources where people can ask questions.
  • It's a total number. Does not show trends. A language might be rapidly fading but still have a high number because of questions asked 5 years ago.
  • Languages with better documentation, where these types of questions are answered might generate less questions.
  • Some languages are used by less Internet-savy developers. (e.g. COBOL?)
  • Some languages are used in environments where Internet use is limited and/or discouraged. (e.g. security-related systems)
  • Some questions are tagged by the library or framework in use and not the language. (e.g. Ruby On Rails has a lot more tags than Ruby.)
  • More questions probably also indicate more newbies to the language which mean newer languages might have higher number of questions.

Anyway, some of the numbers as of today (April 21, 2017):

JavaScript 1,369,708 Java 1,245,453 C# 1,084,612 PHP 1,065,573 Python 737,329 C++ 509,984 ASP.NET 313,926 Objective C 275,572 Ruby on Rails 272,120 .NET 250,922 C 248,307 Ruby 180,234 R 180,031 Node.JS 169,701 Swift 144,520 VB.NET 109,646 Bash 82,775 VBA 79,590 Matlab 70,842 Scala 65,012 Perl 55,815 PowerShell 44,461 Delphi 38,716 Haskell 32,287 Assembly 24,433 Go 21,880 Lua 12,378 SAS 8,013 Dart 6,442 D 2,206 ABAP 1,312 COBOL 964

BTW I just found Stack Overflow Tag Trends that can show the trends both in absolute numbers and in percentage of the total number of question on Stack Overflow.