JavaScript is the most commonly used programming language | Hacker News Reader

JavaScript is the most commonly used programming language

apl.as

59 pointswerencole42 comments

JavaScript is the most commonly used programming language among people who answered this survey. It is astounding to me that people assume the SO survey is representative of all software developers, when in reality it's not even representative of all SO users, let alone everyone who writes software.

This comment convinced me to flag the post, similar to the way I try to flag all posts with headlines that misinterpret or misstate scientific findings. We shouldn't reward authors who choose to twist facts in order to get clicks.

The headline is a quote from the Stack Overflow survey.

The headline for the survey itself isn't misleading. It told me what it was and was worth clicking on. The survey itself also included this sentence: "This survey reached about .4% of all developers on earth."

My gripe is with clicking on something that isn't what it says it is, not with whether or not the original survey was written up in a flawed way.

The source survey is here: http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016 "It's official, USA has the most programmers on earth"

When really, it's just that they answered this particular online poll on this website popular in the USA.

"JavaScript, the most poorly documented language on earth." Because, well, it probably is. You don't go to a central JavaScript reference guide, you google for stuff. Or maybe you're unemployed and have time to answer polls on websites.

MDN documentation is excellent. Node also now has pretty good docs. Googling vs. central docs is more driven by the culture of the programmers. Google's search algorithms also have most of the blame for driving searchers to blogs/articles/SO instead of central docs.

I do agree that this survey is not at all representative, which is why I decided to flag OP.

thats right, sample population are people who are using these platforms, no wonder the answer trends towards the web technology. Great point.

On the other hand, JavaScript is, unfortenately, everywhere, so it is not hard for me to believe it is actually the most widespread.

This blog post was 3x longer than it should have been. The SO survey results explain the situation clearly enough, which already makes it obvious that everybody's perception about JavaScript being used in almost every aspect of programming and by most of the devs, mostly because it was implemented first on browsers, which are now some sort of ultimate medium for applications.

But anyways. This seems to be just a repost of the SO survey to what appears to be a victory to JS lovers.

Thus, misleading title. Should be "JavaScript is the most commonly used programming language by people who also use Stack Overflow."

Doesn't quite roll as nicely off the tongue, huh.

*by People Who Took a Stack Overflow Survey.

This is the largest developer survey out there. VisionMobile may be No. 2 and also has JavaScript as the highest.

Largest doesn't mean highest quality. JavaScript may well be the most widely used programming language there is. However, this survey is too unrepresentative to give us any evidence one way or the other.

> This is the largest developer survey out there

Generally, having a random sample is more important than having a large sample size. The fact that lots of developers were surveyed means the survey tells us nothing about the language usage of all developers, since they were self-selected on a particular platform.

I know the article is referring to "most commonly used" in a different way here (developers choosing it versus end users interacting with software written in it), but I would think that C is still the most commonly used language when you take the latter definition.

Think of all the machines running OS X and Linux (not sure about Windows), the system calls and drivers on most phones, the microcontrollers in your car, your toaster, your TV, etc.

I'd have to imagine C being the most "used" language, given that almost everything we interact with all day long, regardless of whether we are connected to the web, likely has something written in C on it.

Is there a ranking/estimate of this sort of "use"?

I'm being cheeky here, but couldn't you make a case that the user doesn't "use" C, they use the binary.

A user "uses" javascript.

By that argument, shouldn't assembly be the most used programming language on earth?

Does Excel count as a programming environment? If it does, I'd like to see if that outranks JS (my guess is that it does).

You could argue it's the most commonly used FP language, too.

I'd go one step further and even say it's arguably the most popular Reactive languages as well.

Depending on whose count you believe, there are 500-800M Excel users in the world. So it's more than order of magnitude (if not two) smaller than Excel.

I wrote a 3D flight simulator in Excel vba for fun once.

VBA inside office for sure That's got to be bigger if you count legacy code

> "The United States has the highest average age of developers at 32 years old while the media age for the entire survey was 27."

Why is the average of one thing compared with the median of another thing here?

Because the editor needs to learn how to use a full stop between sentences.

Average can mean median: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average#Summary_of_types

Does it here? Also, pun intentional?

I don't know what the author intended, because "average" doesn't necessarily mean "mean", despite what some here seem to think.

More proof, since some on HN seem to disagree with facts: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/average#Usage_notes

So PHP is the third most popular FRONT END technology... Tell me more about it.

No, it's the third most popular technology used by people who identify as front-end developers, as I understand it. Otherwise I don't know why php, sql, java and others would be there at all...

> Most Popular Techonologies per Dev Type

http://arc.applause.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/stack_ove...

I wonder if the results of this research would have been the same if there were other viable options in the web browser. As a software engineer, I view Javascript as a necessary evil, which has been thrust upon me by browser manufacturers, rather than an elegant, well-thought-out language that I just cannot wait to use.

Personally, I think Javascript would have died a well-deserved death a long time ago, if it weren't for web browsers.

There are hundreds of compile-to-JavaScript languages: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/List-of-langu...

Yep, there is. Personally, I like Elm. It still doesn't get me entirely away from Javascript though.

"Used" is not quite a correct term here. It's the most common high-level runtime, yes. But what about the percent that writes in JS? Not in any of its derivatives like CoffeeScript, TypeScript, LiveScript, ClojureScript, Elm etc, but in vanilla JS.

JavaScript is the most commonly used programming language among Full Stack-Overflow Developers. ;)

Also among front-end and back-end, according to the survey.

That this has happened, sets the bar pretty low for AI singularity.

This is not true[0][1]

[0] http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index

[1] https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html

The methodology of the StackOverlow survey does not prove anything, but your sources aren't any better. I have never in my life searched "[language] tutorial" because I always search something more specific (or I use "getting started" instead). That removes me from PYPL completely.

The methodology is quite different, TIOBE consider Google, Google Blogs, MSN, Yahoo, Baidu, Wikipedia and YouTube.

"The ratings are calculated by counting hits of the most popular search engines"

The difference compared with StackOverflow is obviously, but most probably it is obviously just for me.

youtube.com/watch?v=AH7pOUm5s9k

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