Programming language popularity... A fascinating log-log scatter chart (well, fascinating to a programming geek, anyway :) that has GitHub lines of code changed on one axis and StackOverflow mentions on the other. These are both plausible measures of the popularity of any given programming language, and for the most part they yield fairly consistent results. Some of the anomalous looking results are explained in the comments; I suspect we'll see an updated chart with those explainable anomalies cured. Some languages are missing (for example, I went looking for Julia and found it wasn't there).
All the usual suspects are at the upper right – but there were some big surprises for me elsewhere on the chart. I, for one, would never have expected Forth to be where it is – I thought I was one of the last living Forth programmers. Apparently not! And what the heck is Prolog doing in the middle? And Delphi? Isn't it dead yet? Scala, basically still in experimental state, ranks just below the top tier – that seems quite remarkable to me, but probably indicates just how desperate the Java world is for some aspects of functional programming and message-based concurrency.
The lower left part of the chart had me amused for a couple hours, as I looked up these languages I'd never heard of before...
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