A few years ago, Kotlin reached the #2 spot for mo...

# android

[spierce7]

A few years ago, Kotlin reached the #2 spot for most loved language on SO survey. Why is Kotlin so far down this year?

[Casey Brooks]

Because the survey was conducted before Compose went public 😂

[Casey Brooks]

But seriously, from a quick glance at the survey (and my own impressions of the development landscape), the SO survey skews very heavily toward web development, where Kotlin simply doesn't have much presence. Kotlin's niche skews much more toward native Mobile, which has a fairly small representation in the survey.

On top of that, I think we see languages like Python and Rust get over-represented as "most loved" despite having significantly lower actual usage, due to their huge "hype-train" followings. And the high percentage of folks that "hate" Kotlin are more-likely hating Android-the-platform and conflating that to Kotlin-the-language, artificially dropping it in those rankings.

And finally, I think more of the Kotlin community tends to hang around this Slack rather than SO and other dev communities, and so generally is underrepresented with respect to the SO platform/survey.

[spierce7]

despite having significantly lower actual usage

Python usage is very high

[spierce7]

interesting points. Thanks for your thoughtful response

[Casey Brooks]

I don't know the actual usage numbers, but Python's main resurgence in popularity is in the data science/ML technologies, and the measurements we commonly see for "Python is now more popular than Java" is related to web searches (TIOBE Index) not actual usage. The SO shows that only 6.43% of respondents actually work in data science/ML, but that's of course ignoring Python-on-the-server like Django/Flask, which were used by ~30% of respondents. However that same list doesn't even mention Wordpress, which powers over 30% of websites today, and with huge companies like Google, Netflix, and many other huge enterprises built with very large Java backends, it definitely feels like the actual real-world usage of Python isn't quite as high as the statistics show; it's just inflated by the ML-hype. I honestly can't think of any large companies whose main backend technology is Python, most are PHP, Java, .NET, or Rails.

All that to say, I really don't put any stock in those surveys for actually measuring the relative size/happiness of developer communities or technologies, because it seems like they are so wildly skewed toward developer hype rather than actual usage or available jobs.

[Casey Brooks]

And the Kotlin community, especially, seems much bigger and happier now than it did 2-3 years ago, when I first picked it up, despite what the survey says 😊

[spierce7]

I don’t know the actual usage numbers, but Python’s main resurgence in popularity is in the data science/ML technologies

I don’t think this is a correct assumption. Universities are dumping java courses and embracing Python as their default language. I think it’s gained a lot of popularity. I don’t like it, but it’s the way it is

[spierce7]

If you look up usage numbers, you’ll see what I mean.