Languages used by start-ups - 2
November 20, 2018
I was admiring my handiwork at creating SVG (and at defly avoiding my own CSP header restrictions) when I thought "What about Swift? Why is nobody making apps any more?"
But of course they were. I hadn't looked far enough outside the top ten languages on Ripley, so I hadn't found what I wasn't looking for.
So, using the same methodology as before, taking funding as a proxy for start-ups, but trawling though all of the languages I have on Ripley instead of just the first few, gives these new results:
| Language | YCombinator | % |
|---|---|---|
| JavaScript | 113 | 32 |
| Python | 74 | 21 |
| Java | 29 | 8 |
| PHP | 22 | 6 |
| Objective C | 21 | 6 |
| CoffeeScript | 20 | 5 |
| Ruby | 19 | 5 |
| Swift | 12 | 3 |
| Go | 10 | 2 |
| Scala | 8 | 2 |
| Clojure | 4 | 1 |
| Haskell | 2 | 0 |
| Perl | 2 | 0 |
| C | 1 | 0 |
| C# | 1 | 0 |
| Elixir | 1 | 0 |
| Elm | 1 | 0 |
| Erlang | 1 | 0 |
| PureScript | 1 | 0 |
| R | 1 | 0 |
| Typescript | 1 | 0 |
The correlation with Ripley is a whole lot less impressive now though there is still some. The dominance of JavaScript and Python is still there, and the same sort of long tail is back, but in places it's quite a different set of languages.
Objective C and CoffeeScript on the one hand, and Kotlin on the other are clear outliers as languages being used but not talked about, and talked about but not used. But there are other surprises: Perl… in 2018…
Hopefully the results are a whole lot more useful now.