Programming Language Popularity - Part Thirteen

:: programming, c, clojure, common lisp, elixir, haskell, julia, lisp, ocaml, prolog, racket, ruby, rust, scheme

I occasionally compile some statistics on programming language popularity by running a bunch of Google searches to rank programming languages according to the number of results. I wouldn’t read too much into these stats, but they are not without value.

This time, I’ve included the code I use (written in Racket) and the raw data.

I made the following Google searches and summed the results:

"implemented in <lang>"
"written in <lang>"
"developed in <lang>"
"programmed in <lang>"

The table (Emacs org-mode) is divided into sections based on percentage increases of more than 50% from one language to the next.

|------+-----------------+------------+-------+-------|
| Rank | Language        | # Search   | Prev. |  Rank |
|      |                 | Results    |  Rank | Delta |
|------+-----------------+------------+-------+-------|
|    1 | C               | 61,524,000 |     1 |       |
|    2 | R               | 46,576,000 |     2 |       |
|------+-----------------+------------+-------+-------|
|    3 | Java            |  8,236,000 |     3 |       |
|    4 | Python          |  7,659,000 |     4 |       |
|------+-----------------+------------+-------+-------|
|    5 | C++             |  4,151,000 |     5 |       |
|------+-----------------+------------+-------+-------|
|    6 | C#              |  2,029,000 |     6 |       |
|    7 | JavaScript      |  1,907,000 |     7 |       |
|    8 | Go              |  1,898,400 |     9 |    +1 |
|    9 | Lisp Family (1) |  1,751,460 |    10 |    +1 |
|   10 | Fortran         |  1,498,400 |     8 |    -2 |
|   11 | Ruby            |  1,150,500 |    11 |       |
|   12 | Rust            |    907,440 |    17 |    +5 |
|   13 | Scala           |    839,600 |    15 |    +2 |
|   14 | Perl            |    801,200 |    12 |    -2 |
|   15 | Scheme          |    784,400 |    14 |    -1 |
|------+-----------------+------------+-------+-------|
|   16 | Pony            |    499,924 |    30 |   +14 |
|   17 | Forth           |    483,330 |    26 |    +9 |
|   18 | Lisp            |    417,200 |    18 |       |
|   19 | Prolog          |    376,500 |    16 |    -3 |
|   20 | Haskell         |    313,000 |    13 |    -7 |
|   21 | Lua             |    297,200 |    20 |    -1 |
|   22 | Julia           |    268,900 |    25 |    +3 |
|   23 | Common Lisp     |    241,100 |    22 |    -1 |
|   24 | Racket          |    235,110 |    29 |    +5 |
|------+-----------------+------------+-------+-------|
|   25 | COBOL           |    137,900 |    21 |    -4 |
|   26 | Smalltalk       |    126,780 |    24 |    -2 |
|   27 | Erlang          |    125,270 |    19 |    -8 |
|   28 | OCaml           |    103,340 |    23 |    -5 |
|   29 | Clojure         |     73,650 |    27 |    -2 |
|   30 | Elixir          |     54,691 |    28 |    -2 |
|------+-----------------+------------+-------+-------|

(1) combines Lisp, Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, Racket

Source

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#lang racket
;; Copyright (C) 2015-2020 by Brian J. Adkins

;; Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
;; of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
;; in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
;; to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
;; copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
;; furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

;; The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
;; all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

;; THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
;; IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
;; FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
;; AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
;; LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
;; OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
;; THE SOFTWARE.

(require net/http-client)
(require net/uri-codec)

(define search-engine-host "www.google.com")

;; The list of programming languages for which we'll gather usage statistics.
(define languages '("c" "c#" "c++" "clojure" "cobol" "common lisp" "elixir" "erlang"
                    "forth" "fortran" "go" "haskell" "java" "javascript" "julia" "lisp"
                    "lua" "ocaml" "perl" "pony" "prolog" "python" "r" "racket" "ruby" "rust"
                    "scala" "scheme" "smalltalk"))

;; Four distinct phrases we'll search for
(define phrases '("written in" "programmed in" "developed in" "implemented in"))

;; To avoid being blocked, we'll pause for a random number of seconds in the range [ 30 , 90 ]
(define (random-sleep)
  (sleep (+ 30 (random 61))))

;; We'll send User-Agent and Accept headers
(define request-headers
  ;; (list (string-append "User-Agent:"
  ;;                      " Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10; rv:33.0)"
  ;;                      " Gecko/20100101 Firefox/34.0")
  ;;       "Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8"))
  (list (string-append "User-Agent:"
                       " Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10; rv:35.0)"
                       " Gecko/20100101 Firefox/35.0")
        "Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8"
        "Referer: https://www.google.com"))

;; Form the path for the query
(define (form-search-path language phrase)
  (format "/search?q=~a" (uri-encode (format "\"~a ~a\"" phrase language))))

;; Indicate whether the HTTP GET request was successful
(define (success-status? status)
  (regexp-match #px"200 OK$" status))

;; Parse a string of the form 543,987 into an integer
(define (parse-num-results str)
  (string->number (string-replace str "," "")))

;; Perform all queries for a given language. Return (list <lang> num-results)
(define (query-lang language)
  ;; Create a set of search paths for the language and search phrases
  (define paths (map (λ (phrase) (form-search-path language phrase)) phrases))

  ;; Parse the search results page
  (define (parse-results-page io-port path)
    (let ([result (regexp-match
                   #px"<div id=\"result-stats\">.*?([0-9,]+) results.*?</div>"
                   (port->string io-port))])
      (if result
          (let ([n (parse-num-results (cadr result))])
            (printf "Path=~a Num=~a\n" path n)
            n)
          (raise "Failed to parse num results"))))

  ;; Peform a single query for one path, e.g. /search?q="written in racket" and
  ;; return the number of search results.
  (define (one-query path)
    (random-sleep)

    ;; Make the HTTP GET request
    (define-values (status headers io-port)
      (http-sendrecv search-engine-host path #:ssl? #t #:headers request-headers))

    (if (success-status? status)
        (parse-results-page io-port path)
        (begin
          (displayln (port->string io-port))
          (raise "Failed to receive 200 OK"))))

  ;; Recursively query each path in the list and accumulate the sum of the number of results.
  (define (sum-queries paths sum)
    (cond [(null? paths) (list language sum)]
          [else (sum-queries (cdr paths)
                             (+ sum (one-query (car paths))))]))

  (sum-queries paths 0))

(module+ main
  ;; For each language in our list, run the entire set of queries and
  ;; return the number of search results.
  (for ([lang languages])
    (displayln (query-lang lang))
    (flush-output)))

Raw Data

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Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20c%22 Num=23400000
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20c%22 Num=324000
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20c%22 Num=21900000
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20c%22 Num=15900000
(c 61524000)
Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20c%23%22 Num=712000
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20c%23%22 Num=161000
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20c%23%22 Num=567000
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20c%23%22 Num=589000
(c# 2029000)
Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20c%2B%2B%22 Num=2720000
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20c%2B%2B%22 Num=108000
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20c%2B%2B%22 Num=461000
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20c%2B%2B%22 Num=862000
(c++ 4151000)
Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20clojure%22 Num=38900
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20clojure%22 Num=3950
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20clojure%22 Num=16800
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20clojure%22 Num=14000
(clojure 73650)
Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20cobol%22 Num=78300
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20cobol%22 Num=16000
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20cobol%22 Num=22900
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20cobol%22 Num=20700
(cobol 137900)
Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20common%20lisp%22 Num=134000
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20common%20lisp%22 Num=14800
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20common%20lisp%22 Num=58200
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20common%20lisp%22 Num=34100
(common lisp 241100)
Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20elixir%22 Num=29400
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20elixir%22 Num=531
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20elixir%22 Num=16800
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20elixir%22 Num=7960
(elixir 54691)
Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20erlang%22 Num=59100
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20erlang%22 Num=7670
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20erlang%22 Num=33800
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20erlang%22 Num=24700
(erlang 125270)
Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20forth%22 Num=416000
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20forth%22 Num=8730
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20forth%22 Num=18200
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20forth%22 Num=40400
(forth 483330)
Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20fortran%22 Num=562000
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20fortran%22 Num=47400
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20fortran%22 Num=399000
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20fortran%22 Num=490000
(fortran 1498400)
Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20go%22 Num=1090000
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20go%22 Num=68400
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20go%22 Num=561000
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20go%22 Num=179000
(go 1898400)
Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20haskell%22 Num=143000
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20haskell%22 Num=19600
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20haskell%22 Num=93000
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20haskell%22 Num=57400
(haskell 313000)
Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20java%22 Num=5160000
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20java%22 Num=136000
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20java%22 Num=1070000
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20java%22 Num=1870000
(java 8236000)
Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20javascript%22 Num=921000
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20javascript%22 Num=154000
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20javascript%22 Num=546000
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20javascript%22 Num=286000
(javascript 1907000)
Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20julia%22 Num=94300
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20julia%22 Num=17700
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20julia%22 Num=127000
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20julia%22 Num=29900
(julia 268900)
Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20lisp%22 Num=170000
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20lisp%22 Num=29800
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20lisp%22 Num=85400
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20lisp%22 Num=132000
(lisp 417200)
Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20lua%22 Num=166000
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20lua%22 Num=27000
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20lua%22 Num=69700
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20lua%22 Num=34500
(lua 297200)
Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20ocaml%22 Num=47400
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20ocaml%22 Num=7640
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20ocaml%22 Num=25100
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20ocaml%22 Num=23200
(ocaml 103340)
Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20perl%22 Num=326000
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20perl%22 Num=41200
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20perl%22 Num=164000
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20perl%22 Num=270000
(perl 801200)
Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20pony%22 Num=491000
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20pony%22 Num=4
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20pony%22 Num=7070
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20pony%22 Num=1850
(pony 499924)
Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20prolog%22 Num=123000
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20prolog%22 Num=21000
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20prolog%22 Num=93500
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20prolog%22 Num=139000
(prolog 376500)
Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20python%22 Num=5130000
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20python%22 Num=95000
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20python%22 Num=1440000
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20python%22 Num=994000
(python 7659000)
Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20r%22 Num=14800000
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20r%22 Num=276000
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20r%22 Num=17800000
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20r%22 Num=13700000
(r 46576000)
Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20racket%22 Num=215000
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20racket%22 Num=1660
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20racket%22 Num=3850
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20racket%22 Num=14600
(racket 235110)
Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20ruby%22 Num=949000
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20ruby%22 Num=44700
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20ruby%22 Num=65600
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20ruby%22 Num=91200
(ruby 1150500)
Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20rust%22 Num=777000
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20rust%22 Num=4040
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20rust%22 Num=47600
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20rust%22 Num=78800
(rust 907440)
Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20scala%22 Num=606000
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20scala%22 Num=22700
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20scala%22 Num=39900
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20scala%22 Num=171000
(scala 839600)
Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20scheme%22 Num=255000
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20scheme%22 Num=24400
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20scheme%22 Num=289000
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20scheme%22 Num=216000
(scheme 784400)
Path=/search?q=%22written%20in%20smalltalk%22 Num=42900
Path=/search?q=%22programmed%20in%20smalltalk%22 Num=8480
Path=/search?q=%22developed%20in%20smalltalk%22 Num=39200
Path=/search?q=%22implemented%20in%20smalltalk%22 Num=36200
(smalltalk 126780)