How programmers transition between languages

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Monday, 29 January 2018 at 10:12:04 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Mon, 2018-01-29 at 03:22 +0000, Ola Fosheim Grøstad via 
> Digitalmars-
> d wrote:
> […]
>> I guess some go to Rust after working with Go, but the 
>> transition matrix linked above suggests that the trend has 
>> been that people give up on Rust and try out Go then Python... 
>> Of course, with so little data things are uncertain and can 
>> change.
>
> I think this is an important point. There was some interesting 
> data found, some hypotheses possible, but without further 
> experimentation and/or formal use of Grounded Theory 
> exploration, all commentary is speculation and opinion.

Grounded Theory cannot be used for trend analysis though. 
Certainly you could use quantitative data for sampling some users 
(using some kind of stratification) and interview them and then 
use GT to try to capture themes in the psychology of people who 
move from one language to another. So yes, more interesting, but 
you wouldn't learn more about the actual trend.

It is like the difference between knowing why waves build up in 
the ocean (qualitative) and knowing how many large waves we have 
and where they tend to occur (quantitative). Both are interesting.