Hacker News Reader

Comment by heresie-dabord | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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

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

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

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

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.

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