What programming languages are used most on weekends?

I surprised there was no mention in the blog post or the comments so far about the homework factor. It isn&#x27;t just personal side projects that people are working on over the weekend. I am betting the relative percentage of CS students on the site is also much higher on the weekend. Tags like assembly, pointers, algorithm, recursion, class, and math are all rather vague. Those topics are all discussed at length in CS classes, but if you are working on a real world project in those fields, odds are you will tag it with a more specific technology you are using rather than the abstract theory behind it.<p>EDIT: On second look, Python, C, and C++ are also the go to languages for CS classes (along with Java but that is also a big enterprise language unlike the other three.) Almost this whole list seems to be schoolwork related.

The funnel shape of the scatter plot immediately reminded me of an article on the insensitivity to sample size pitfall [0], which points out that you&#x27;ll expect entities with smaller sample sizes to show up more often in the extremes because of the higher variance.<p>Looks like the tags with the biggest differences exemplify this pretty well.<p>[0]- <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dataremixed.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;avoiding-data-pitfalls-part-2&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dataremixed.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;avoiding-data-pitfalls-part-2...</a>

One way I use Stackoverflow’s dev stats is to make educated guesses about the easiness of finding developers in 2-3 years time to maintain now-greenfield projects. Does Ruby seem to go down while Python is in steady growth? Let&#x27;s move away from Rails. Swift is picking up steam? It&#x27;s safe to switch from Objective-C. This dataset seems to be just fantastic for that.

Somewhat related, if you&#x27;re looking to compare tags from StackOverflow, I made this site[1] a couple years ago to quickly visualize how many questions and answers are out there for given tags.<p>I use StackOverflow tag count as well as Google Trends and GitHub star count to get a rough feel for how much people are using certain things, such as version control software[2], databases, or view engines in Express[3].<p>[1] - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.arepeopletalkingaboutit.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.arepeopletalkingaboutit.com&#x2F;</a> [2] - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.arepeopletalkingaboutit.com&#x2F;tags&#x2F;cvs,svn,git,perforce,bazaar,mercurial" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.arepeopletalkingaboutit.com&#x2F;tags&#x2F;cvs,svn,git,perf...</a> [3] - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.arepeopletalkingaboutit.com&#x2F;tags&#x2F;ejs,pug" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.arepeopletalkingaboutit.com&#x2F;tags&#x2F;ejs,pug</a>

The answer might be as simple as &quot;people tend to work on games on the weekend&quot;, either as hobby projects or that professional game developers work weekends more often, skewing the weekend results away from serious enterprise apps. This would explain both the rise in low level languages but also things like OpenGL, Unity3D and Actionscript 3. It doesn&#x27;t explain Haskell, of course, but I think the Haskell explanation in the article is accurate.

I don&#x27;t think the number of questions asked correlate with which languages are used the most. My weekends are mainly Java, but I don&#x27;t need to post on stack overflow because all of my questions have been already addressed.

&gt; We defined weekends using UTC dates...<p>...which means quite a few Saturday mornings in Asia have been counted as weekdays and many late Friday nights in the Americas have been counted as weekends.<p>It would be great if StackOverflow had information on the local timezone that the question was asked in. Seeing Mon-Fri 9-5 vs other times would be interesting.

I can see room for lots of false assumptions when reading this data.<p>What if Haskell never changes the rate at which it is discussed - but all the entry programers doing the 9-5 job go away on the weekends helping Haskell to be &quot;louder&quot;? What if the people with homework ask more on the weekend than during the week?<p>What if certain developers don&#x27;t post questions tagging a language - but rather tagging an algorithm knowing they can implement it in whatever language they need?<p>What if Haskell only works on the weekend?

Not many Sharepoint enthusiasts out there, it seems.

One thing that caught my eye is that at least of the tags included in their scatter plot, there appear to be more weekend searches than weekday searches on average overall, especially for the most popular tags. (And note that the X axis is logarithmic, so those will have a much larger effect on total searches.) I wouldn&#x27;t have expected that. Perhaps weekdays are more geared toward &#x27;getting things done&#x27;, so weekends are when people have time to learn.

Microsoft should really take note of that. That&#x27;s a huge tick on their woefully uncool meter. Developers, developers, developers, developers don&#x27;t want to use Microsoft gear unless they&#x27;re being paid, it would seem.

It might also be interesting to see which tags are used more in the early mornings or evenings vs during the workday.<p>Edit: I hadn&#x27;t seen Kaggle before today, but it looks very easy to hack on the SO data set [1] with a Jupyter notebook.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kaggle.com&#x2F;stackoverflow&#x2F;stacklite" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kaggle.com&#x2F;stackoverflow&#x2F;stacklite</a>

Happy to see Python-3.x taking over old Python.

No big surprise that nobody works on sharepoint or XSLT as a weekend hobby.

Also interesting to see the weekend dips in google trends, e.g. Java: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;trends&#x2F;explore?date=today%201-m&amp;q=java" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;trends&#x2F;explore?date=today%201-m&amp;q=jav...</a>

Not even a single Rust mention. Hmmm. Not sure if I&#x27;m a weekend-idiot or simply ahead of the crowd. Let&#x27;s hope it&#x27;s because of Rust developers both strongly disliking and never experiencing _stackoverflows_. ;+)

Also somewhat related. I made this site to show you the popularity of programming languages on Stack Overflow by countries and US states: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;soversus.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;soversus.com</a>

Exploring StackOverflow Data - Evelina Gabasova (2016) [video] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qlKZKN7il7c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qlKZKN7il7c</a>

Python? If noyt it should, because there is no better <i>prototyping&#x2F;bootstrapping</i> language and definitely there is no better culture than that which emerged around this language.<p>Only Scheme of old days could be compared to have similar similar balance of features and culture of careful attention to details, which, basically, defines a craft approaching (turned into) an art.

Oh that&#x27;s a wonderful idea. Someone should - continue to - study the differences between weekday and weekend hacking. Programming languages, but also methods, productivity, value for customers, etc.<p>The way I would like the world is that the weekend hacking has way better methods, languages, productivity and value for customers.

Seriously, though, if you are going to post the following thing in your article then just reconsider:<p>&quot;Warning: the following section involves googling usernames and reading the first page of results for the people involved. This may be unethical. I apologize in advance.&quot;<p>Obviously your apology means nothing if you are doing it anyway.

Sidenote: I always feel limiting that you cannot use Haskell in the weekend in your Android or iOS mobile phone or tablet. I think this is a natural environment for learning.<p>There are some Haskell apps in the app store but they are not official or they are using tricks like executing the code in a remote server.

&quot;actionscript 3&quot; what? o_O<p>I thought this is over

My weekends are usually pretty rough and unstable, so I went with this one several months ago and it fits well into my life style: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Brainfuck" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Brainfuck</a>

Coincidently I&#x27;ve just read several chapters from the Learn you a Haskell book. I couldn&#x27;t write any serious Haskell project in near future, but learning it has been so much fun. No surprised when many other programmers are touching it on weekends.

Wow I&#x27;m surprised to see ExtJS on a list of &quot;most used&quot; anything. I mean don&#x27;t get me wrong it&#x27;s great if you want to prototype something quick that uses data but for a great UX &#x2F; real application it&#x27;s dreadful to use IMO.

The curve for Selenium on this graph is the weirdest thing:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.stack.imgur.com&#x2F;LUQei.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.stack.imgur.com&#x2F;LUQei.png</a><p>Anyone want to speculate why this may be?

Everyone is pointing out potential problems with the methodology, but really this matches up pretty well with experience. SQL, MS Office stuff, boring things like logging, and testing all show up as being about work. Haskell is actually infamous for having an evangelical following and limited real-world uses. And, yeah, your C-like languages work well for both work and side-projects. This all makes perfect sense. The only thing I&#x27;m surprised about is assembly being for pleasure (maybe hardware people?), and web stuff being as versatile.

The number of new questions tagged by mainstream language has been relatively stable (python) or decreasing (java, js, php) in 2016.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.axibase.com&#x2F;chartlab&#x2F;c1acecc0&#x2F;3&#x2F;#fullscreen" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.axibase.com&#x2F;chartlab&#x2F;c1acecc0&#x2F;3&#x2F;#fullscreen</a><p>If anything, it might suggest that the knowledge base coverage is reaching a plateau. It would be interesting to watch how many questions are tagged as duplicates. The ratio is probably increasing.

Visualizations that are more accessible would be great. I have red-green deficiency so I can&#x27;t differentiate the lines on the charts for the life of me..

Wouldn&#x27;t StackOverflow questions equate to <i>confusion</i> about the language rather than use, or at least use <i>heavily weighted by</i> confusion?

In general, the weekday questions are dominated by enterprise products that cost money. The weekend questions are mostly about stuff that is free.

This doesn&#x27;t <i>necessarily</i> mean the most used languages. Probably these are the languages that developers are trying to learn and post the questions. And other languages such as C#, Java have reached certain state that people may not have lot of questions, so certainly the activity would decrease and doesn&#x27;t mean lot of people don&#x27;t use these languages.

I&#x27;d be more interested in Github commits on weekends vs. weekdays as that is likely to be a better indicator of side projects (due to the &quot;homework factor&quot;). Or maybe Gitlab commits or private Github commits since public Github commits are FLOSS and thus likely to include more side project commits than another data sets.

I didn&#x27;t see the word &quot;legacy&quot; technology used in the article, but I think a lot of the stuff in the weekday column is exactly what people associate with the word legacy. I mean soap and xslt !? That is straight from the darkest era of bloated J2EE apps.

Are number of questions asked a good determinant of language popularity?<p>One would think the &quot;ideal&quot; programming language would be so intuitive that it would have a much lower questions asked to usage ratio.<p>The two might not be that strongly correlated.

It may be better to group like languages&#x2F;frameworks and compare them over time:<p>Django vs rails for example.<p>Comparing languages heavily used by acedemics may skew things since they often work on the weekends. Or game development languages vs webapp languages.

Assembly is too vague of a tag

TL;DR: On weeekends people either do homework if they are students or play with the languages they would like to work with, if they work in some SharePoint salt mine during the week.

Relevant research : StackOverflow questions referenced in the source code hosted on Github <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sociting.biz" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sociting.biz</a>

Just quoting a comment from the page itself:<p><pre><code> According to the infographic, most people spend their week struggling to get a document out of SharePoint; whereas on weekends, they write cool algorithms in Haskell, C, C++11 or assembler. This is a surprisingly accurate reflection of the situation on the ground, from what I hear from people around me. Now the question is: how can we swap the weekend for the week, so that more people can do more of the cool stuff? </code></pre> <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;disq.us&#x2F;p&#x2F;1fzpzr5" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;disq.us&#x2F;p&#x2F;1fzpzr5</a>

I was kinda surprised that Go (golang) wasn&#x27;t up in the list

The surprising thing is actually that a significant number of people seems to be spending weekends in preparing for interviews[1]<p>1. example &quot;recursion&quot;, &quot;algorithm&quot;

C# doesn&#x27;t get the love it deserves because everyone loves to rag on Microsoft. I think Bill Gates should be in prison, but C# deserves better :)

This just makes me so glad that I don&#x27;t have to spend my weekdays working with sharepoint, SOAP, excel, VBA, and internet explorer.

I&#x27;m going to assume Haskell has the most asked questions because it&#x27;s one of the most confusing languages.

nothing against haskell, but this is funny:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;classicprogrammerpaintings.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;143847262458&#x2F;haskell-meetup-edward-hopper-oil-on-canvas" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;classicprogrammerpaintings.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;143847262458&#x2F;hask...</a>

As someone who just started using Assembly on my weekends, I find these results shocking.

Cmon, nobody is doing SOAP work on the weekends!? ;)

Not looking good for Microsoft...

without factoring in time zones, this contains some friday and monday usage, no?

Javascript, all day every day.

Python.

Given the current user revolt over there regarding recent political shenanigans by the mods (and CEO), I&#x27;d be keen to see how their trends track over the next few years.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;342903&#x2F;well-always-endeavor-to-do-whats-right-well-try-to-do-it-better-next-time?noredirect=1&amp;lq=1" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;342903&#x2F;well-always-e...</a>

I am tired of people confusing programming languages and domain specific languages. Sql is not Turing complete.

I do a lot of HTML&#x2F;CSS(Sass) using Middleman. Sometimes, I do Ruby.