Back in my programming languages days, when I was on the committee for a programming languages conference, I spent lots of time arguing the pros and cons of certain languages1. I still keep an eye on the programming languages community, even though I haven’t been actively involved since I was the Industry Chair for OOPSLA 2008.
So when I stumbled across this project by a couple of people at UC-Berkeley to cluster programming languages, of course I was interested. They’re collecting opinions about programming languages via survey, and drawing plenty of interesting observations from the data that they’re collecting. They’re showing correlations for various properties about the programming languages. For example, there’s a high positive correlation between “I would use this language for writing server applications” and “the thought of using this language in 20 years fills me with dread”, which I have to admit made me laugh out loud. There’s a high negative correlation between “code written in this language will usually run in all the major implementations if it runs on one” and “I would list this language on my resume”, another correlation which made me laugh. Actually, all of the high correlations for “I would list this language on my resume” are pretty interesting.
For my fellow programming language geeks, you should definitely check out this site. And, of course, you should fill out the survey and help further their research!