The future is looking bright for Python

Stack Overflow recently released a cool new tool called Trends. This tool allows you to compare Stack Overflow question tags over the course of years. I think the idea behind this tool is the correlation that “the more people ask questions about ThingX, the more that ThingX is being used”, where “ThingX” is anything from a language, OS, framework… whatever.

Conveniently enough, Stack Overflow also gives a few “preset” graphs in case you’re lacking creativity at that moment. Check out the Most Popular Languages trend chart. Wow, that’s… noisy?

While that’s tough to look at, you can’t deny that’s a ton of really great information. But wait, the awesome developers at Stack Overflow have given us a really great feature. Mouse-over either the tag in the legend, or the line itself. As you can see, it dims the unfocused tags and bolds the focused one.

Take 15 seconds and mouse over all the tags, starting from C# and go all the way down to Assembly. What do you see? I’m no data scientist, but to me it’s pretty obvious that Python has, by a very large margin, the greatest positive slope (future?). In fact, it appears to be only one of two languages listed here that even has a positive slope (R is the other one, and it looks like Assembly is low but pretty steady).

Even the ever-so-popular JavaScript seems like it is on an unexpected decline recently.

Note: I’m a huge fan of JavaScript. Love it. Which is why the above makes me crinkle my brow even more so.

Even though Python doesn’t have the lion’s share at the moment, it’s pretty obvious that the future for our beloved language is extremely bright. That’s not really a surprise to anybody that has used Python even briefly. It really is the one ring to rule them all. It does almost everything in the software development world. You want to create a web app? Python. You want to write a CLI app? Python. You want to analyze data or do data science-y things? Python. You want to do system automation/scription? Python. You want to create a GUI app? Python. … and many many more. Not to mention it is a great developer exerience at that.

Long live Python!

P.S. It looks like Python 3 has finally pulled ahead of Python 2 in the past year. Even more great news!! (Note: this obviously doesn’t take into account those that just use the python tag and don’t indicate which version)