Two weeks ago someone
ran a poll on Hacker News
asking what the readers’ favorite programming language was. Yesterday
(April 5) I took a look back at the poll to see who came out on top.
I wasn’t surprised to see Python win, but I was surprised to see it
lead Ruby by over 1,000 votes. C# fared well with 5th place, and Haskell
and Clojure rounded out the top 10.
- Python (3044)
- Ruby (1718)
- JavaScript (1412)
- C 966
- C# 828
- PHP 662
- Java 551
- C++ 529
- Haskell 518
- Clojure 458
- CoffeeScript 361
- Objective C 326
- Lisp 321
- Perl 310
- Scala 233
- Scheme 190
- Other 188
- Erlang 162
- Lua 145
- SQL 101
No other language had over 100 votes, but Groovy was added two hours
late, so perhaps if were included to begin with it would be on the list
instead of “other.”
Polls like this don’t do much to tell us which programming
languages
are “best” or what languages are most used in production. They’re not
even controlled to make sure the people voting are actually programmers,
so it’s hard to read too much into them. But they do tell a bit about
what languages developers
like to use. As developers become
entrepreneurs and startups become enterprises, these sort of preferences can have an impact on the
job market, so taking a look at these sorts of lists can help developers decide what to learn. And for employers, they can provide a
data point
for deciding what languages attract developers. Of course the usual
caveats apply – use the best tool for the job and use these results as
only a single data point weighted against many others to decide what to
learn/use.
