The Programming Language with the Happiest Users

I'm surprised by the authors surprise at Perl programmers being the "happiest". It's a fun language that enables a lot of cool stuff with a very low barrier to entry. No reason folks shouldn't be happy. It's also a language with a very long history of playfulness being baked right in...Perl golf, obfuscated Perl, Perl poetry, etc. Larry's State of the Onion addresses are historically as funny as they are informative.

Meaningless chart/data is meaningless.

<i>The “C” query combines C++, objective-C, C and C#. It would be nice to split this out in future work.</i><p>Indeed, despite the common ancestry, those languages (and the people who use them) are very very different from each other.

It seems an odd oversight to leave out two of the most popular languages on the web, PHP and JavaScript.

Interesting idea, but I personally do not trust Twitter data for analyzing sentiments, mostly because of the problem stated in the article: we often don't really know (or worse, misunderstand) the tweeter's true opinion. I prefer good old-fashioned random polling.

It's unlikely the small percentage of programmers who use twitter are representative of programmers in general.

I certainly mean no disrespect to the author (since ingenuity driven by nothing other than curiosity should never be frowned upon), but the data seem suspect.<p>There are numerous small factors: anecdotally speaking I write code but don't use Twitter to discuss code (nor do any of my coworkers); I spend most of my day in Python and Java but if I were to Tweet it would likely be in anger about JavaScript or CSS or any of a host of other languages I must deal with that weren't included in the sample.<p>But more importantly, languages that enjoy vast market penetration are going to differ significantly in terms of public acclaim from those with small, dedicated, passionate user bases. And so for example it comes as absolutely no surprise to me that Haskell would rate higher than Visual Basic.

I find it interesting that there are Twitter users that actually code in Cobol. Also, PHP is not even on the list :) I would think that coding in PHP with a good framework like KohanaPHP or CodeIgniter, much more fun than writing in Cobol or Fortran.

I doubt we can conclude much about programmers of a certain ilk as a result of the last 150 programming related updates on Twitter. Maybe if the data were more transparent I could understand better what Delores Labs' graph represents.<p>One problem I see in the methodology is that the sample size for each language would vary dramatically. So the results for e.g. Haskell is probably based on a relatively small number of tweets compared to e.g. Java where we would expect a lot more tweeting. The problem that introduces is that we base conclusions on maybe 1 or 2 individuals in the case of Haskell versus ~dozens who would have tweeted about Java.<p>In the end, what difference does it make what some random people judge the sentiment of a tweet to be? Is the aggregate written sentiment of a language a scalar that strongly correlates to another scalar called happiness?

How about the programming language with the fewest <i>un</i>happy users?

Smug Haskell weenies: coming up strong on Smug Lisp Weenies!

This is barely "good to know" information, without any other use, IMHO.<p>I think programming languages fanboyism is just like videogame console fanboyism - you could argue day and night why this or that one is better, but in the end I like my thing and you like your thing.

A good programmer can't be happy with a language he/she uses (unless he's the creator of that language) by definition. If a programmer is happy though, it can possibly mean some kind of religious happiness, which this chart may be proving correct, I'm afraid.

The one tweet about LISP he cites is straight from the recent "history of programming languages" blog article that was tweeted about a lot. So that might have distorted the results quite a bit.<p>Very surprising that there are COBOL users on Twitter.

whoa, COBOL programmers tweet?