Top all-time · #116
RedMonk
Company blog · redmonk.comprogrammingbusiness
RedMonk is the company blog at redmonk.com, writing about programming and business. Since 2008, 357 different Hacker News readers have linked it 804 times, most often “The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: June 2019”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-19, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 4 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link RedMonk for developer-focused industry analysis, mainly its programming language rankings and pieces on cloud pricing, open source business models and developer trends.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The developer-focused analyst firm
Most-linked posts?
- The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: June 201911 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2019-07-19
- RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 20209 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2020-02-28
- The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 20258 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2025-06-21
- The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: June 20188 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2018-08-11
- The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 20157 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2015-01-15
- Programming languages ranked by expressiveness6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2013-03-25
- The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: June 20216 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2021-08-05
- The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 20216 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-03-01
- Why Open Source Matters6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-08-03
- The Cloud and Open Source Powder Keg6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-03-16
What Hacker News says?
The top 10 according to Red Monk[1] are JavaScript, Java, Python, PHP, C#, C++, CSS, Ruby, C, Objective-C, Swift, TypeScript, Scala, Shell, Go, R, PowerShell, Perl, Haskell, Kotlin. Of these, Javascript (w3), Python (Python Foundation), CSS (w3), C++ (ISO), Ruby (community), C (ISO), Shell (Posix), R (community), Perl (community), and Haskell (community) are not bound to a single company. [1] https://redmonk.com/sog…
Comment linking /sogrady/2019/03/20/language-rankings-1-19/
on “Go is Google's language, not ours”Submitted Programming Language Rankings: June 2016 as a story · 251 points
HN discussionThis article talks about Amazon forking Elasticsearch in depth: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2019/03/15/cloud-open-source-pow...
Comment linking /sogrady/2019/03/15/cloud-open-source-powder-keg/
on “Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money”Submitted Programming Language Rankings: January 2019 as a story · 202 points
HN discussionWhile I agree that GCP's deprecation policy is painful, I don't think he's painting a compelling picture that the deprecation policy, specifically, is the reason GCP isn't ranked higher. Taking two of the examples of "bad platform moves": Python 3 and Apple. Where I work, we are simultaneously dealing with Python 3 and GCP deprecations[1], and it sucks. But Python is more popular than ever![2] Yes, some people (incl…
Comment linking /sogrady/2020/07/27/language-rankings-6-20/
on “Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You”Submitted Red Hat is pretty good at being Red Hat as a story · 152 points
HN discussion> Sourceforge literally bundled malware for a while. So everyone had to move. This was after SourceForge hugely declined in popularity. The correct sequence of events is: 1. SourceForge massively declined in popularity, 2. and then in a desperate attempt to extract cash they started bundling malware. Not the other way around. All of this had little to no effect on the migration away from SourceForge, which was alrea…
Comment linking /sogrady/2011/06/02/blackduck-webinar/
on “Why GitHub won”Submitted Kindness, tech staffing and resource allocation as a story · 130 points
HN discussionRedMonk | Analyst | US-based | Full-time We're a small, developer focused industry analyst firm that researches a variety of infrastructure technologies from hardware to software. We're trying to help companies understand and adapt to a world that has changed, one in which developers are the new kingmakers. We're looking for a data-driven analyst, ideally with solid quant skills (R or Python) and a passion for techn…
Comment linking /jobs/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2018)”Submitted GitHub Language Trends as a story · 113 points
HN discussionHmm, apparently it is slowing, according to Donnie Berkholtz http://redmonk.com/dberkholz/2014/09/26/githubs-vanishing-ac... The growth will be in non tech companies starting to do software, and non software uses of git, but noth of those will be slower perhaps. And maybe Windows shops moving to git too.
Comment linking /dberkholz/2014/09/26/githubs-vanishing-acceleration/
on “GitHub Raises $250M at $2B Valuation”Submitted How AWS Cloud is demolishing the cult of youth as a story · 108 points
HN discussion> Avoid CoffeeScript. Most of its better features are now in ES6, a standard. This argument against CoffeeScript isn't very objective. One of CoffeeScript's best features is the minimalistic and expressive syntax. "CoffeeScript (#6) appears dramatically more expressive than JavaScript (#51), in fact among the best of all languages."[1] "CoffeeScript is #1 for consistency, with an IQR spread of only 23 LOC/commit com…
Comment linking /dberkholz/2013/03/25/programming-languages-ranked-by-expressiveness/
on “State of the Art JavaScript in 2016”Submitted The Developer Experience Gap as a story · 95 points
HN discussionPython. https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html https://www.statista.com/statistics/793628/worldwide-develop... https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2024/03/08/language-rankings-1-2...
Comment linking /sogrady/2024/03/08/language-rankings-1-24/
on “Unexpected productivity boost of Rust”Submitted Flightcaster (YC S09) and the Future of Asymmetric Intelligence as a Product as a story · 93 points
HN discussionTIOBE is as good as counting the number of times a programming language appears in a meme in r/programmerhumor. It's beyond useless. This is a better list, and cobol is not even part of the top 20, while Ruby is at 9th place: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2024/03/08/language-rankings-1-2...
Comment linking /sogrady/2024/03/08/language-rankings-1-24/
on “Boring tech is mature, not old”Submitted Why You Should Pay Attention to Node.Js as a story · 92 points
HN discussionRedMonk | Analyst | US-based | Full-time We're a small, developer focused industry analyst firm that researches a variety of infrastructure technologies from hardware to software. We're trying to help companies understand and adapt to a world that has changed, one in which developers are the new kingmakers. We're looking for a data-driven analyst, ideally with solid quant skills (R or Python) and a passion for techn…
Comment linking /jobs/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2016)”Submitted The Dead End as a story · 83 points
HN discussionRedMonk - http://redmonk.com/jobs - Remote or Portland, ME or London, UK Analyst ## Who is RedMonk We're the analyst firm that thinks developers are the most important constituency in technology. Our work shows up here on HN from time to time. ## What You Need to Have - A rational, fact-based based approach. Opinions are fine. Data is better. - The ability to synthesize disparate data from different sources, both qu…
Comment linking /jobs
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2015)”Submitted The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 2014 as a story · 81 points
HN discussion> where does it stop? Perhaps after giving each open source project 11 cents? That made me curious about the numbers, and I found a paper which says "Daffara estimates that there were 18,000 active open source projects in September 2007 worldwide"[0] which would mean donating about $2000. Another analysis from 2013 calculated that "87% of projects have 5 or fewer committers per year"[1] so if we unreasonably assume…
Comment linking /dberkholz/2013/04/22/the-size-of-open-source-communities-and-its-impact-upon-activity-licensing-and-hosting/
on “We Just Gave $155k to Open Source Maintainers”Submitted Programming languages ranked by expressiveness as a story · 80 points
HN discussionI talked about this at OSBC, in case you (or anyone else) is interested. It's basically the verbose version of the comment above. http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2011/05/24/the-age-of-data/
Comment linking /sogrady/2011/05/24/the-age-of-data/
on “Open Source (Almost) Everything”Submitted MongoDB is the New MySQL as a story · 74 points
HN discussion> Are there any popular non-Rails uses for Ruby? No. I'm going to get downvoted for this, but Ruby isn't popular itself (with or without Rails). It's barely more popular than Fortran, according to TIOBE[1]. It cracks the top 10 according to Redmonk, but has been generally declining since 2012[2]. Somewhat shockingly, it's even less widely used than Rust according to Stack Overflow[3]. They also found Ruby has a 53%…
Comment linking /kfitzpatrick/2021/03/02/redmonk-top-20-languages-over-time-january-2021/
on “Rails 7 Released”Submitted A return to the general-purpose database as a story · 73 points
HN discussionCompare the Redmonk rankings in 2020 to 2025: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2020/02/28/language-rankings-1-2... https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-2... I think of languages as falling in roughly 3 popularity buckets: 1. A dominant conservative choice. These are ones you never have to justify to your CTO, the "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" languages. That's Java, Python, etc. 2. A well-k…
Comment linking /sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-25/
on “PHP 8.5 adds pipe operator”Submitted Programming Language Rankings: February 2012 as a story · 71 points
HN discussion
