How programmers transition between languages

[Michael]

On Friday, 26 January 2018 at 09:02:03 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> While this analysis of language popularity on Github is 
> enlightening:
>
> http://www.benfrederickson.com/ranking-programming-languages-by-github-users/
>
> I found the older analysis of how programmers transition (or 
> adopt new languages) more interesting:
>
> https://blog.sourced.tech/post/language_migrations/
>
> Like how people move from Rust to Go. And from Go to Python:
>
> https://blog.sourced.tech/post/language_migrations/sum_matrix_22lang_eig.svg
>
>
> Also the growth of Java is larger than I would anticipate:
>
> https://blog.sourced.tech/post/language_migrations/eigenvect_stack_22lang.png
>
> Granted, Java has gotten quite a few convenience features over 
> the years.

I find it fascinating that C# is in the "languages to avoid" 
section, because from my perspective it's receiving more and more 
adoption as the modern alternative to Java, in a way that Go and 
Rust are not. Different markets and all of that. So I can't see 
why C# would be seen as a language that is dropping in popularity 
(though I don't use it myself).

I do worry that, having been using D for about 3 1/2 years now, 
that the perceptions of D outside of this community don't seem to 
be changing much. It does seem to make a huge difference to have 
a big company behind a language, purely for the "free 
advertisement". Most people at my university, outside of the 
computer science department, that are using languages like Python 
and R and MATLAB the most, are very aware of Rust and Go, but not 
D. I wonder if we do need to pay more attention to attracting new 
users just to get people talking about it.