Aspects of Programming Language Popularity

A colleague pointed me to the interesting RedMonk programming language rankings recently. In their graph, the popularity of various programming languages is plotted against axes representing their prominence on stackoverflow and GitHub. There is of course correlation between these two quantities, resulting in a very discernible line rising from the origin to the upper right, but there are some interesting outliers. Awk, for example, is frequently cited in stackoverflow but is the base for very few GitHub projects, which makes sense: hardly anyone would want to start a new project based on awk, but of course its many idiosyncrasies are going to stimulate lots of stackoverflow queries.

On the other end of the spectrum, Puppet has inspired many GitHub projects but is not so greatly discussed on stackoverflow. Obviously Puppet is very popular and widely used, so I thought this was an interesting result, perhaps indicative of a relatively clean project with fewer pitfalls than one would normally expect?

But before drawing sweeping conclusions, RedMonk should at least attempt to explain VimL's apparently tremendous popularity on GitHub, where its position above the 75th percentile makes it more popular than the aforementioned Puppet as well as a number of other well-known languages/environments. Meanwhile on stackoverflow it is ranked very close to the zero'th percentile, which strikes me as a more intuitive result.

Anyway, check out the graph for yourself.