I usually don’t write blog entries that are merely pointers to someone else’s blog entries, but I’m making an exception this time. A blogger named Lukas Biewald, in a blog called/of Dolores Labs, wrote an entry called The Programming Language With The Happiest Users.
He measured Twitter “tweets” that mention certain programming languages, and ascertained which were positive. I’m particularly interested because Lisp came in second place.
Interpreting this as “the programming langauge with the happiest users” depends on several tacit assumptions that seem dubious at best. We don’t know that the people writing these comments are actually users. The number of tweets sent about a language is not uncorreleated with the langauge; I bet there are fewer COBOL programmers using Twitter than Perl programmers. Not everybody tweets about how much they like or dislike their langauge as much as everybody else. He knows this and mentions some of these problems at the end of the post, so I’m not saying this to criticize him.
Yes, the title of the blog post is sort of misleading, but written to get the attention of readers. I cannot criticize him for that either, since I do the same thing. Sometimes it backfires; a lot of people seem to have seen my post named “Why Did M.I.T. Switch from Scheme to Python” without getting my points, which were (1) they didn’t make a high-level decision to switch languages, but rather this fell out as an end consequence of decisions that had nothing to do with languages, and (2) this is only for the freshman core courses, not the whole curriculum.
It’s hard to draw any hard and meaningful and useful conclusions from this research, but I still find it interesting and entertaining.