Analyzing the complex relationship between the most loved, hated and used programming languages
15K thousand people participated in a Twitter meme where they were asked to express their relationship with programming languages.
We collected and analyzed with Graphext all the answers. Here are the main insights that I found.
Each node is a person and their tweet, those who answered more similarly get connected (Graphext dimensionality reduction algorithm calculate a similarity score) In the extremes you find people that mentioned the same language for all the categories), like Ryan Florence
The question that correlates more with the rest of is about what is the programming language is more used. In the image we can see a clear map of web developers on the right (Javascript, PHP, Ruby) and data scientists on the left (R, Python) and C/C++, Java in the middle.
Among the most loved programming languages, Python wins over the most used, Javascript. In the top 10 we can find 2 less used languages but emerging with many fans already: Go and Rust.
When we see the ranking of the most hated programming languages and their distribution, it’s clear that almost everybody hates Java no matter what other languages they use the most. Javascript is mostly hated among non web developers but also by people that use it all the time.
Python wins by far when it comes to recommending a language for beginners for almost most programmers, except for web developers that go for Javascript. Ruby is quite recommended relatively respect to its usage.
Basic, Pascal, QBASIC, Visual Basic… stand out as programming languages that were learnt first by the people who participated in the crowdsourced survey meme. But none of these languages are recommended today to learn programming.
The programming languages that give more headaches are C and C ++ and they go for Python. Many who use Javascript have some trauma with Java. There are many those who freak out with functional programming (Haskell, Lisp) or with declarative (Prolog) or Assembly in college.
