Hacker News Reader

Comment by austinz | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what sort of technologies are popular in China. Heard rumors that there was a thriving golang community there, but that's literally the extent of my knowledge.

View on HN

I don't really think there is anything special. I don't actually grow up in China as a programmer but when I was a kid PHP was a big thing due to the popularity of BBS like phpBB and Chinese's Discuz!. You can find Python, Java, C++, and .NET just like in America. Though I find (based on limited experience) Ruby is not a very popular language in China.

edit: here is a list from 2012: http://www.ithome.com/html/it/25225.htm

chart 1, 2, 3: Shenzhen, Shahai, Bejing

chart 4, 5, 6: worldwide, US, India

Since many Chinese projects are system-level and scientific. Plus there is a huge gaming industry in China.

Another relevant chart from this very site: https://code.csdn.net/explore/projects

Wow, those charts are really surprising. Maybe it's just because I'm a web developer and sort of walled off inside the foreigner tech scene, but in my experience most companies here (in Shanghai) seem to exist in either Java or PHP land (based on what my boss has said about hiring and job postings I've seen).

What really makes a difference is that, in China, online gaming is really huge, possibly the biggest cash cow for most of internet companies. This makes language like Go and Erlang really popular in China, for their performance in concurrency.

Proof: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=erlang%2C%20golang%2C...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com