What about people just using the language, and not talking about it?
Whatever metrics are used, based on published data, you have the problem that most programming is done privately, and does not leave traces you can put in your stats. What about the millions of people coding in C, who just get on with the job? How do you measure that? Maybe languages such as Python and JavaScript are talked about a lot, because they have more defects than other languages.
I still have trouble with Python's syntactic indentation rules. When everything is neat and tidy, the code is very readable, but if you copy and paste code, you have to be careful to correct the indentation, or you can end up with code that compiles and runs, but does something entirely different to what you intended. With curly brackets to delimit blocks, the compiler will pick up obvious nonsense. Despite these criticisms, I find Python to be rather useful in practice, for writing small stuff for my own use. Put it this way, it is a lot better than shell scripts, if there is any real computation involved.
This brings me to my problem with Javascript, which is its loose type system. I admit I have limited experience here, but I struggled with the language accepting my rubbish code silently, and doing God knows what, instead of pedantically pointing out errors, which would actually have been helpful. One bug was due to a typo, where I wrote code that added an integer to an Object. I still don't know what actually happened, if anything. Maybe someone's cat was incinerated in Estonia.
There is an idea that dynamically typed languages like Python and Javascript are somehow easier to use than statically typed languages like C++ or Java, because you don't have to write loads of stuff to declare the types of variables and functions. But actually, what you are doing with type declarations is telling the compiler what you want to do, instead of leaving it to make a guess. These days, static type systems are not such a pain, as there is type inference, so you only have to declare some stuff, because the compiler can work out the rest, in a rigorous manner. This seems to work in Rust.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
