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If we approach the question as engineers, scientifically, with numbers and studies, not anecdotes and hand-waving, then Clojure is hands down the best language in terms of productivity and bug reduction. To this day, I know of no study that was able to demonstrate superiority of statically-typed languages - [1]. What studies clearly show, is that both in terms of productivity [2] and bug reduction [3], expressivity reigns supreme. And Clojure is the most expressive [4] out of languages that can leverage huge ecosystems (Java and JS, soon C++ through Jank dialect). [1] https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/ [2] PBX study from Economics of Software Quality by Caper Jones [3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.10220 [4] https://redmonk.com/dberkholz/2013/03/25/programming-languages-ranked-…

All these languages may work very well for many people for the described use cases. But one of Scala's strength is versatility. You could use it quite well for all the listed use cases too. With just one language. (Maybe with the exception of system programming -- Scala Native still requires a tracing GC.) Also, it's worth noting that Scala is more popular/mainstream/supported/has bigger community than Julia, Zig and Elixir / gleam. And if Red Monk is to be trusted, even more than Rust https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2024/09/12/language-rankings-6-24/ That comes with many benefits. > if you don’t need JVM / Java interop OpenJDK is also very good, even if it's not a strict requirement to use it. Battle-tested, easily debugable, etc... AOT compilation is possible via GaalVM's native-image. Or you can try Scala.js or Scala Native (which don't have anything to do with JVM).

These "terrible" changes like type inference and pattern matching look great to me. The article mentions Dart as a simple alternative, but funny enough Dart has type inference too and is planning to add pattern matching. I don't see C# dying. Redmonk looks at both StackOverflow and GitHub projects and the combined popularity of C# remains remarkably constant: https://redmonk.com/rstephens/files/2022/10/redmonk-language-rankings-… The languages that are growing, like Kotlin and Rust, have these hipster features too.

https://rbranson.medium.com/rds-pricing-has-more-than-doubled-ef8c3b7e… is a good example of using the generation abstraction to improve margins. Obviously, this source is not a price increase. It’s just increase in premium over EC2. https://redmonk.com/rstephens/2021/12/17/iaas-pricing-2021/ Is also great and shows a flatness in price

What would convince you? * top companies using it? (shopify, github, stripe) * number of stars on github for projects? https://github.com/rails/rails has 50k stars * place in the Redmonk language rankings? https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2021/08/05/language-rankings-6-21/ shows it at #9 * ability to get a good paying job? https://marketing.dice.com/pdf/2020/Dice_2020_Tech_Salary_Report.pdf has the ruby salary at 114k, more than typescript/javascript I am an active member of the ruby community so am definitely biased, but I'd love to know. Sorry if that's combative, but I always wonder how folks choose languages based on popularity. If there's anything folks can point at, or if it is more of a gut feel. (Unless it is javascript or C, which are always going to be around because of their huge deployed base.) Edit: added place in the redmonk ratings. Changed to be less combative.

I write in all kinds of languages. Just because Wordpress generates it, doesn't make it a best practice. Do you think Wordpress websites are the best? It's definitely not the most popular language: https://github.com/emmanuel-keller/github-language-statistics https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2019/03/20/language-rankings-1-19 PHP is falling because it has major issues. It has poor idioms and is slow. It is trending down, not up.

> I'd love to see a "programming language benchmark game" > that only allowed idiomatic code and compared languages based on code length. You just described the old Debian language benchmark game. You could select the various coefficients to apply to code size, program speed etc. I remember it played an important role when I decided to give OCaml a try: I selected 1 for size, 1 for speed, 1 for RAM and zero for everything else, and that resulted in OCaml and Pascal, the two languages I was prejudiced against from school years. Of course I went with OCaml. From the same era: http://blog.gmarceau.qc.ca/2009/05/speed-size-and-dependability-of.htm… Also relevant: https://redmonk.com/dberkholz/2013/03/25/programming-languages-ranked-…

The difference between where we think the advantage of open source goes and the reality of who it advantages, overall, is the root of a great deal of confusion and helplessness. Your point reminded me immediately of this article from late last year: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2018/12/21/cycles-oss/ The article's reasoning struck me as fundamentally sound, but it began with the false identification of open with the public, rather than private, interest. As for your proposal, have a look at the Fair Source License: https://fair.io/ I blogged initial thoughts on Fair, line-by-line, when it came out: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2016/03/30/First-Read-of-the-Fair-Sourc…

Number of github repos, which likely correlates to number of users. It also is probably a better gauge of the number of maintained, relevant libraries available. Clojure is used in production quite a bit nowadays, and there are excellent libraries for all kinds of modern tasks. https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2018/03/07/language-rankings-1-18/

IIRC the guy who wrote this article http://redmonk.com/dberkholz/2014/05/02/github-language-trends-and-the… about GitHub language trends scraped the numbers from the search page, e.g. the following search yields all repos created in 2014 and the language breakdown in the sidebar: https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=created%3A%22%3E%3D2014…

> What are the shackles? I think it would be supporting libraries. Looking at RedMonks's statistics[1] Pascal doesn't even feature (I was able to find ~600 on GitHub). By today's standards that's a pretty big shackle, you'd have to write a lot of functionality yourself (although that's ignoring that you can use C libraries with a little effort). I love the language, it just had no staying power. Maybe people just prefer curly braces. [1]: http://redmonk.com/dberkholz/2014/05/02/github-language-trends-and-the…

Here is a different set of measures that puts JavaScript first, followed by Java http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2014/01/22/language-rankings-1-14/

This talk[1] by sogrady (originally presented at FOSDEM 2012) has a lot of interesting statistics demonstrating the popularity of JVM-based languages, and how they have been growing. The numbers come from sources including HN, GitHub, Indeed.com and Ohloh. Definitely worth a glance through. [1] http://redmonk.com/public/fosdem2012.pdf

I just want to second that. I work closely with Voxer (I'm at Joyent), and these guys are both very sharp and dealing with some very interesting problems. Add in the kicker that this is a commercially relevant problem (I am an avid Voxer user as well), and I don't know what else you could ask for in a startup. For whatever it's worth, I worked with Twitter in a similar fashion way back in the day [1], and I can say that Voxer is every bit as exciting and promising -- but with a much more technically talented team. If you're a whole-stack software engineer in San Francisco, you owe it to yourself to check these guys out! [1] http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2007/04/24/twitter-is-going-to-scale-…

There's also http://apigee.com/. And for high-level guidance, http://redmonk.com/, kind of a Gartner for platforms/developers.

You are spot on . Twitter has an asymmetric follow model, whereas Facebook tends to be guided towards smaller closed networks. Here's where I learnt about "asymmetric follow" : http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2008/12/05/assymetrical-follow-a-core…

Two comments about the submission: First: The author, katamari64.se, is clearly an incompetent, dishonest, manipulative wretch, deeply similar to some of the wretches he criticizes. And there is absolutely no good reason for the article being as long as it is. The article also is full of completely obvious errors, like footnotes being broken, indicating that it might have been partially or fully generated without review. Second: For whatever reason, the article fails to question this claim: > Wonderfully, Odin is now being used by dozens of companies, thousands of public projects, and over a million hobbyists Specifically, the "million hobbyists". That number is not sourced and is likely utterly false. The claim about thousands of public projects might be true, judging by https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=language:Odin , but many of those repositories are for tiny projects that have not been updated for a long time, or have even been archived. Redmonk does not even seem to list Odin: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2026/04/14/language-rankings-1-26/ . I don't care too much about Odin having a Wikipedia entry or not, but some of the more important claims in favor of Odin's notability are potentially utterly false, yet this article doesn't even address them despite its utterly and unnecessarily bloated length. To summarize: The article, its author, and Wikipedia, are, at best, trash. It is fine that the Wikipedia article was removed, it would also have been…

Nearly two years have passed since the AI slop experiment with curl, which revealed the inefficiency of filtering HackerOne reports during the trial. It also exposed the simmering emotions and exhaustion of the maintainers overseeing those open-source projects. In the link, you will see that Sunday was specifically chosen for the experiment to elicit the most human responses possible. Upon reviewing the HackerOne reports following the experiment, it was found that many remained categorized as "Not-applicable" or "Spam," including even a "Happy New Year" message from a novice hacker. It is unfortunate that such an individual had to be bluntly taught a lesson by the reality of the world. These events demonstrate that being human does not vary in direct proportion to technological knowledge. However, one can see the clear effort by the curl team to protect their open-source project, which has a massive user base. A successful hack would result in immense damage, making their sacrifice highly commendable in my view. Yet, this attempt to protect also creates a divide between the defenders and those who cause them to waste their invaluable time. Personally, I believe everyone's time is valuable—both the curl maintainers and the new programmers attempting to use AI to generate income, or even those with the intent to spam. Even if the spammers are devalued, with their time considered less worthy than those trying to protect the world, it still reflects our inherent…

Compare the Redmonk rankings in 2020 to 2025: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2020/02/28/language-rankings-1-20/ https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-25/ I think of languages as falling in roughly 3 popularity buckets: 1. A dominant conservative choice. These are ones you never have to justify to your CTO, the "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" languages. That's Java, Python, etc. 2. A well-known but deliberate choice. These are the languages where there is enough ecosystem and knowledge to be able to justify choosing them, but where doing so still feels like a deliberate engineering choice with some trade-offs and risk. Or languages where they are a dominant choice in one domain but less so in others. Ruby, Scala, Swift, Kotlin. 3. Everything else. These are the ones you'd have to fight to use professionally. They are either new and innovative or old and dying. In 2020, Haskell was close to Kotlin, Rust, and Dart. They were in the 3rd bucket but their vector pointed towards the second. In 2025, Kotlin and Dart have pulled ahead into the second bucket, but Haskell is moving in the other direction. It's behind Perl, and Perl itself is not exactly doing great. None of this is to say that Haskell is a bad language. There are many wonderful languages that aren't widely used. Popularity is hard and hinges on many extrinsic factors more than the merits of the language itself. Otherwise JavaScript wouldn't be at the top of the list.

> Companies and business leaders don’t care if jobs are hard or annoying or take longer than they “should”. The difference between a user story taking a day or 3 days is negligible compared to its business value. Companies and their leaders care about revenue and costs. They care about customers and growth. They care about time to market. If we want to have our non-technical colleagues listen and act, we need to either improve our use of the financial terms they understand or we need to translate our message into business outcomes that they do care about. I confess, after many years, Im finding it pretty tiring working for businesses/people that dont have the capability to understand or assess. That we keep having people running the show who lack the faculty to understand how the meat is made, that are unfit to judge or assess the health of the company's output is wearisome. This article is the hard truth of how to deal with the shitty situation almost everyone is in- us human resources, being tooled & wielded by a far off, distant, & unknowing managerial class. This article is great real talk, for techies. But the absurdity & dissonance is not discussed here. The techhood are humams raised amid alien cultures, alien civilizations, dropped into even more particularly multi-alien kmany genrations of aliens) worlds/living systems. We are demanded of, commanded, directed by people unseeing, incapable of assessing. Even if they saw the sausage being made they'd have no…

> COBOL, PHP, and FORTRAN all lack modern ecosystems (package managers, etc) which hinder them significantly. Its unfortunate that PHP has been clubbed with COBOL :-). You may not be aware but PHP has a great package manager called composer. It is intensively used in the PHP community for a long time now. The packages are available at https://packagist.org/ . Packagist houses 300,000+ packages and has received 50 Billion package downloads since 2012 (See https://packagist.org/statistics ). PHP's Packagist would actually would easily rank amongst the biggest package management ecosystems among programming languages. PHP is certainly not disappearing. While it is no longer as dominant as it used to be and there is a slow, long term decline, it continues to be very active. Ruby's decline actually is sharper than PHP. Here is an interesting resource https://redmonk.com/rstephens/2021/08/05/top-20-june-2021/ . All statistics need to be taken into perspective but if you look at other proxy activity like GitHub PRs, projects, jobs etc. for PHP, it continues to be very strong. Using the word "disappearing" feels wrong to me. Trends are not irreversible. Over the years, languages have gone down, only to come back up. P.S. Fortran is still going strong also. It is still used extensively in the Scientific Computing community. While, I'm not familiar with the ecosystem there are package managers in Fortran too. I'm not familiar with how good or popular they are though.

> Are there any popular non-Rails uses for Ruby? No. I'm going to get downvoted for this, but Ruby isn't popular itself (with or without Rails). It's barely more popular than Fortran, according to TIOBE[1]. It cracks the top 10 according to Redmonk, but has been generally declining since 2012[2]. Somewhat shockingly, it's even less widely used than Rust according to Stack Overflow[3]. They also found Ruby has a 53% loved vs. 47% dreaded score, compared to Python's 68% and 32%. It's especially surprising that Stack Overflow's respondents like Ruby less than JavaScript and SQL, the two most frustrating languages I have ever been forced to work with myself. > Python and Ruby occupy the same space and use cases This is absolutely untrue. I personally loathe Python, but it is perhaps the most useful language you can learn right now, and it barely overlaps with Ruby. It's huge in statistics/data science and machine learning. It's not the most common web backend, but it still has a fairly large ecosystem for the web. It's rapidly rising in popularity, too. 1. https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ 2. https://redmonk.com/kfitzpatrick/2021/03/02/redmonk-top-20-languages-o… 3. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#most-popular-technologi…

> Avoid CoffeeScript. Most of its better features are now in ES6, a standard. This argument against CoffeeScript isn't very objective. One of CoffeeScript's best features is the minimalistic and expressive syntax. "CoffeeScript (#6) appears dramatically more expressive than JavaScript (#51), in fact among the best of all languages."[1] "CoffeeScript is #1 for consistency, with an IQR spread of only 23 LOC/commit compared to even #4 Clojure at 51 LOC/commit. By the time we’ve gotten to #8 Groovy, we’ve dropped to an IQR of 68 LOC/commit. In other words, CoffeeScript is incredibly consistent across domains and developers in its expressiveness."[1] Using the author's train of thought I could state: "Avoid Bluebird[2]. Most of its better features are now in ES6 promises, a standard." Yes promises are in the ES6 standard, but that's not the best feature of bluebird. There were and are many promise based libraries, but bluebird was built for unmatched performance. One will use it if performance matters. Even today it's faster than the native implementations of promises [3]. > Tooling (such as CoffeeLint) is very weak. Maybe because, as it turns out, in CoffeeScript you don't need a lot of tooling. Why would that be a bad thing? > Electron is the foundation of the great Atom editor and can be used to make your own applications. Atom is written in CoffeeScript [4]. [1] http://redmonk.com/dberkholz/2013/03/25/programming-languages-ranked-b… [2]…

RedMonk - http://redmonk.com/jobs - Remote or Portland, ME or London, UK Analyst ## Who is RedMonk We're the analyst firm that thinks developers are the most important constituency in technology. Our work shows up here on HN from time to time. ## What You Need to Have - A rational, fact-based based approach. Opinions are fine. Data is better. - The ability to synthesize disparate data from different sources, both quantitative and qualitative. - Excellent communication skills, and ideally experience presenting. - The ability to write clear, digestible and insightful analysis of complex technology – and not take months to do it. - A reasonable online presence. You don’t need to be Taylor Swift, but if you don’t know what Twitter is there’s a problem. - Deep and relevant technical expertise in technology infrastructure. - A personality that both we and our clients enjoy working with. You can call this the no assholes rule. - The ability to travel regularly to industry events and client sites. - A passion for developers. ## It’d Be Nice If You Had - A background in statistics, economics or both. - Exposure to/training with statistical programming languages (R or Python if you must). - Experience as a developer, whether as a hobby or profession. - A broad range of technology exposure (as opposed to being expert in a tiny niche). - Familiarity with media creation and editing; audio, video or both. - An affinity for craft beer. To apply for the position, please…

Most developers are hesitant to accept new programming paradigms, so it takes a very long time to change how people write code (something Brett Victor captured brilliantly in his talk, The Future of Programming [1]). Therefore, I can't really say if "ten years from now" is the right time frame or if it's more like thirty years. That said, I think it's safe to say that static typing is "winning" if it ends up being used in almost every single one of the top 10 programming languages. By "used", I mean it's used in the vast majority of the core language libraries and by most major companies that depend on the language. Depending on which popularity chart you want to believe (e.g. langpop [2], TIOBE [3], or RedMonk [4]), the top 10 languages are roughly the various flavors of C (C, C++, C#, Objective C), Java, PHP, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Perl, and Shell. With the exception of Perl (which will not be in the top 10 for much longer) and Shell (which will probably be in use for a long time), all of those are already statically typed or moving towards it. I think a similar metric could apply to functional programming: if the top 10 languages use functional programming in the vast majority of the core libraries and by most major companies, then it has "won". This will likely take longer than static typing, but if companies keep adopting languages like Scala and Clojure, they may crack the top 10 some day. Of course, it's worth mentioning that what's really "winning" right now is…

https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2026/04/14/language-rankings-1-26/ This is usually considered a better ranking. This has Rust at #20.

> It seems to me that the software field overall has become more open to a wider variety of languages and concepts, and knowing Ada wouldn't be perceived as widely as career pidgeonholing today. Are you sure? I cannot even find Ada in [0]. I tried modifying some Hello World example in Ada some weeks ago, and I cannot say that I liked the syntax. Some features were neat. I had some trouble with figuring out building and organizing files. Like C++, and unlike Rust I think, there are multiple source file types, like how C++ has header files. I also had trouble with some flags, but I was trying to use some experimental features, so I think that part was on me. [0]: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-25/

Now compare that list to the amount of companies using the top languages listed here, https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-25/ Hence my niche remark, naturally there are a few using it, otherwise Allegro and Lispworks would have filled for bankruptcy already.

You’re probably right. RedMonk [0] shows JavaScript and TypeScript separately and has the former well above the latter. [0] https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-25/

Python. https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html https://www.statista.com/statistics/793628/worldwide-developer-survey-… https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2024/03/08/language-rankings-1-24/