Strange that there is no Python there. [Insert joke about Python being so intuit...

fuzzix · on Oct 31, 2012

"[Insert joke about Python being so intuitive and easy to use no one asks questions about it]."

Hey, that must be true of Perl too! :)

quink · on Oct 31, 2012

I'll bite, in response to the average time being just over half an hour.

> I think the time is higher than that of PHP or JavaScript because almost everything is just soooo easy with Python, so only questions with at least a bit of complexity get asked.

skrebbel · on Oct 31, 2012

It was kind of a relief for me - when frequenting HN, one might get the idea that everybody and their dog uses Python for everything, religiously. It's good that there's people out there who simply accidentally forget that it exists.

insin · on Oct 31, 2012

It's the tenth most used tag on Stack Overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/tags

draegtun · on Oct 31, 2012

From a visual quick scan of the tags here is a list of the top languages:

     1  c#           371433
     2  java         317047
     3  php          295016
     4  javascript   279976
     5  c++          156107
     6  python       140451
     7  objective-C  107083
     8  c             74124
     9  ruby          57577
    10  vb.net        36981
    11  perl          22101
    12  dephi         17439
    13  scala         11745
    14  haskell        8696
    15  actionscript   6102
    16  groovy         4970
    17  clojure        4046
    ..  f#             4046

draegtun · on Oct 31, 2012

Additional to above, 11 months ago I also recorded some SO stats: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3286348

Using these figures the % growth in questions asked in the last 11 months would be:

  java        76%
  php         76%
  javascript  85%
  c++         60%
  python      70%
  c#         716%
  ruby        67%
  perl        50%
  scala       76%
  clojure     77%
  lua         77%

Assuming I've made no calculation or recording errors then the 700%+ increase on c# is quite amazing!

alexchamberlain · on Oct 31, 2012

Really? I thought all of HN used Ruby; I of course use Python, C and C++.

skrebbel · on Oct 31, 2012

Dear downvoter: What the hell? I can only assume that you clicked that button because I wrote something remotely-not-entirely-worshipful about Python, and in that case, have you really connected your identity so strongly to a single programming language that you feel comments unfriendly towards it should be invisible on a place like HN?

natep · on Oct 31, 2012

Because it doesn't add anything to the conversation for someone to point out that their confirmation bias was shown to be wrong.

skrebbel · on Oct 31, 2012

Hey. Damn. You're right. Thanks.

glyphobet · on Oct 31, 2012

Here's the same query with Perl and Python added:

http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/83730

Python comes in at 34, halfway between Java and Ruby, and Perl at 45, between Haskell and Scala.

draegtun · on Oct 31, 2012

Many thanks for link. For posterity here is the list produced sorted on average:

              avg  std dev
  php         24   41.2894351860362
  javascript  26   43.0588803567294
  c           27   45.4245721268946
  c++         28   45.2483939710062
  c#          30   47.3345103589879
  java        31   48.3674381995104
  python      34   50.9682383156793
  ruby        40   54.1612457522965
  haskell     42   57.6626651794045
  perl        45   57.7285412002331
  scala       53   60.4111999775783
  clojure     59   63.6228517085076
  lua         60   64.9920293705815

kamaal · on Oct 31, 2012

People rarely face a problem with the language itself. Most of the times its either the problem they are trying to solve, or its interface with the language.