Top 10 Most Popular Programming Languages 2014
With the end of 2014 approaching I was wondering what were the most popular programming languages of 2014 I decided to see if I can, somehow, get a satisfactory answer for my question.
Needless to say the chart below is nowhere near 100% accurate as there are a lot of variations for each tag. Moreover, it contains languages that might not be considered as programming languages, such as HTML, JavaScript etc and I have not added their frameworks in their count (example: JavaScript and JQuery). As you can imagine the data can be interpreted differently depending on how you want to parse the row data.
For my findings I used Stack Overflow’s database to query the posts that were created in 2014, then split and sorted the tags based on how many times they appeared in the posts. After parsing and processing 9307 unique tags with a total of 2591986 occurrences, these are the results.
Raw Data
| Tag Name | Tag Count |
|---|---|
| JavaScript | 150927 |
| PHP | 114808 |
| Java | 106522 |
| HTML | 78740 |
| C# | 78396 |
| Python | 59513 |
| C++ | 34620 |
| Objective-C | 23641 |
| R | 17549 |
| C | 17151 |
“Moreover, it contains languages that might not be considered as programming languages, such as HTML, JavaScript etc”. Since Javascript is the most popular language on Github, so maybe a lot of programmers on Github are not programming most of time.
For my part, I don’t see how Javascript can *not* be considered a programming language. Hello, flow control, variables. Maybe the author was thinking of it as an adjunct to HTML. Even if that were still true, that’s a limitation of the way the language is used, not the way the language itself.
And yes, I know that Javascript was originally designed as a server side language. But that use case was largely ignored until recently.
Why does this kind of article exists?
Those results are very misleading. Consider the fact, that C as the one of the oldest languages from your list was most likely >>fully<< answered since creation of StackOverflow. From the other point of view when talking about JavaScript (same can be applied to JAVA) – there are so many frameworks that people actually do not consider themselves programming in JavaScript (lets just take jQuery as one of greatest examples – people actually program in JavaScript however they consider JavaScript as foreign and remote to their experience). You did mention that but I do not think you have put enough emphasis on this aspect.
So I see this study quite useless – sorry.
Thank you for your comment Gregsky,
As for the frameworks, I do agree, and JQuery was actually extremely high in the rankings so it would have played a huge role in favor of JavaScript. But merging the frameworks was out of the question as it takes the whole crunching of the data to an entirely different direction. An example of that would be C# and differentiating between ASP.NET VB and C# as well as other related frameworks.
The way I see it, it is extremely hard to have a definite answer when it comes to popularity of the languages, as there are many ways one can interpretative data, something that I tried to make clear in the post above when I mentioned the accuracy of the results.
It may bring some benefit to the reader if it was highlighted that above chart is most likely biased :-)
Especially when you drought attention with such strong title: “Top 10 Most Popular Programming Languages 2014” – this title is a statement of fact.
Anyways – I would very much like to see how did you put those numbers together – manually or automatically?
Semi-manually. I had to create a small program to do the tag counting for me, as there were 2,591,986 (non unique) tags in total.
Then I simply filtered the tags by the name and incriminated the “parent” tag based on the tag count of the child tags. PHP <-- PHP5.4 etc. As for the title, you are right. Something like "Top 10 Most Popular Programming Languages 2014 in Stack Overflow" might have been more accurate. But again, it depends how you view it as you still have the visit hit count that can pretty much cancel the results out since that probably has more gravity. As long as you can filter out crawlers and a lot of other variables. Perhaps a question mark at the end would be even more appropriate :)