I guess, PR data shows you what needs to be updated frequently. Personally, I like getting code right and shipping it and never thinking about it again. But for "here's how to reproducibly install the newest possible version of foobarbaz" yeah, a lot of updates are going to be needed, simply because "the latest version of foobarbaz" is likely a moving target.
Their metric is just to search for "$LANG programming" in various engines, then assign arbitrary weights depending on the search engine used. It doesn't really measure anything, and has already been gamed intentionally, since it's so simple.
Every metric is going to have its pitfalls, but at least this one seems to be measuring something that approaches reality.
According to that the top 3 are js, python and java, in some order. I think it’s a good Litmus-test to fail statistics that have a different top ranking (TIOBE being beyond useless, having listed Visual Basic as 6th some time ago?!)
That actually does not surprise me. It's considered a step up from (and often used with) Excel, which is also everywhere.
Also, the 3 lines of scripts it is used for is hardly a big amount. Excel is big, but when companies grow out of it they go for integration with “proper” applications instead.
If you replace “has already been” by “can be”, I think all of that applies to this, too.
Or did I miss something?
Nix has been getting attention among my friends. I’m still in “wait and see”. The next big thing after TS won’t be an incremental improvement. It will solve big problems like:
- Too many ways to do things. (Remove ambiguity. Instead, make choices for me so others’ code is predictable. Apple approach. Does Swift do this?)
- Naming suffering from backwards compatibility. (For…in vs for…of etc.)
- AI integration?
PHP is losing to JS due to 7.0 or whatever. Scala surprised me!
For that reason, I am consuming a very large salt crystal alongside this information.