Hacker News users are a fickle bunch, with a tendency to hype up obscure programing languages and frameworks, only to discard them once they’ve lost their novelty. I’m sorry, but it’s absolutely true, and why I’ve long ceased to visit it.
Charting the stratospheric rise and meteoric fall of these languages and frameworks is Stack Overflow, which today launched a tool that shows you interest in a particular technology over time. It measures interest by the number of questions asked each month.
JQuery’s popularity is in decline, but it remains top dog. As demonstrated by the graph, interest in Angular remains steady; the angularjs tag refers to the first version of the popular front-end framework, with the angular tag representing subsequent versions.
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Unsurprisingly, back-end and UI frameworks are a lot more brutal. Stack Overflow charted the historical trends of several different frameworks, and they all displayed the same pattern: swift growth, and even swifter decline.
Stack Overflow also looked at three mainstream languages – Python, PHP, and Perl – and charted their growth (or lack thereof) since 2009. Python, unsurprisingly, is kicking ass. PHP is still clearly popular, but it’s in decline — perhaps due to being a “fractal of bad design.” Perl, on the other hand, is pretty stagnant.
More insights can be found here, on Stack Overflow’s blog. And if you want to discover your own trends, you can check out the same tool used in this piece here.
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