Silverlight extinguished while Angular wins fans among developers Developers are done with Microsoft's Silverlight and Apache Flex, but they've been entranced by Android Studio, the Swift programming language, and Angular, a JavaScript framework. Coding community site Stack Overflow on Monday plans to publish details about which technologies have seen the greatest surge and the most …
> couldn't that just mean it's well documented and not bug-ridden?
My thoughts, and I'll add: or just not "trendy".
Incidentally, when I am googling something up I make it a point to skip all the stack overflow results (often the full first page), finding that bug reports/discussions in code repositories (Github, Gitlab) usually give answers that are more:
* authoritative
* up to date
* correct
Also: "googling up" (like that in lowercase, to annoy Alphabet Inc.) for technical answers is often done via DuckDuckGo or Qwant, which seem to assign less weight to Stack overflow than their main competitor.
Not to mention, because stack overflow is an English-language site, it can only see what is going on primarily in the West plus India (or India plus the West), notably failing to reliably capture activity on the increasing number of home-grown technologies coming from China (take Vue.js as a random example).
"interest, according to data scientist Julia Silge, is measured by Stack Overflow tags – labels or keywords submitted with questions posted to the community site to associate queries with particular topics."
Older technologies already have the questions asked and answered. Measurements like these explain the continuing popularity of VBA and VB.NET, and COBOL, despite the announcements of their respective imminent deaths - because most of the questions have already been posted on Stack Overflow, and answered.
Newer technologies have many questions to be posed and answered; thus, there are more questions posted to the community. That will always be the case for any newer technology.
A more accurate metric would be to look at what information has been researched on Stack Overflow. If someone finds the answer, they're hardly going to ask it again.
Three statisticians go on a duck shoot. A bird goes up - the first statistician raises his gun and shoots, but alas the shot is 50cm too high and so he misses. The second statistician has a go, but he shoots 50cm too low and so also misses. The third statistician puts down his gun and says "we got it".
Not at all.
All major players have spun up something that they have claimed will be "The next big thing, honest" and it's gone nowhere.
I think MS is the one that was most willing to do so simply to destroy a competitor and preserve it's not-a-monopoly-other-OS's-are-available market.
Some will rise, some will rise as the preferred way to access the environment that drove their creation (EG Android today, SAP or Oracle yesterday) and some will curl up in a ball in the corner and die. Maybe the implementation of their ideas was rubbish, maybe the ideas were just not that big an advance over what you can get already, maybe they were but the learning curve was just too big to go there for the benefits (the old HP calculator story. RPN is great if you were prepared to swallow the learning curve, and many weren't).
> but they've been entranced by Android Studio, the Swift programming language, and Angular, a JavaScript framework.
I'm not sure entranced is the right verb. These things are (almost) unavoidable if you want to deliver to an Android or A☐Thing or if you need a responsive web UI just to make js nearly tolerable. It's kind of like saying that car makers are entranced with creating both LHD and RHD versions of their cars. It'd save them a fair whack of coin if they didn't, but they have to do it to sell in different markets for both regulation and customer preference reasons.
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