Following this question , I am interested to know how you could appreciate the popularity of any and all programming languages.
As professional developers, we need to know the trends in the software industry — which languages employers will look for in the next few years, and we must be experienced. In addition, this may allow us to identify opportunities - perhaps there are new opportunities for new developers to develop mainframes, as older members of the profession retire. For this reason, it is important for us to track the popularity of a programming language.
There are already many questions about stack overflows ( here and here ) about how SO can be used to assess the popularity of a language (or the difficulty of using a specified language). Other methods include tracking ads (i.e. http://www.hotskills.net/ ) and search engine query statistics (i.e. http://langpop.com/ ).
Can the SO community think of any other methods of measuring this?
Summary
- Use tags to measure language popularity
- Search Engine Query Statistics
- Job advertisements
- Source code repositories
As various participants note below, each of the above sources has problems as a reference for calculating the popularity / use of the language.