Python, Matlab, R and Julia

Keywords

Matlab, Python, R, Julia

The Stackoverflow Developer Survey has a section on programming languages called Most loved, dreaded and wanted.

I’ve written about the contrast between Python and Matlab for teaching in Python, Matlab, teaching, but I am also interested in R and Julia.

See the detail below. In summary:

• Many developers like Python, few dislike it, and it is the language developers are most interested to learn.
• R and Julia appear to be similar, in that about half its current developers like it, but a roughly equivalent proportion dislike it. More developers want to learn R than Julia, which is not surprising; R has many more users.
• Not many developers like Matlab and very few developers want to learn it. Three quarters of developers currently using Matlab, do not want to continue using it.

Here are the definitions for each category:

• Loved: % of developers who are developing with the language or technology and have expressed interest in continuing to develop with it.
• Dreaded: % of developers who are developing with the language or technology but have not expressed interest in continuing to do so.
• Wanted: % of developers who are not developing with the language or technology but have expressed interest in developing with it.

The table shows the positions of each language in the descending ordered list for each category. There are 25 languages in each list. If the language does not appear in the list, I’ve put “>25” as the position.

	Loved	Dreaded	Wanted
Python	3	>25	1
R	19	20	14
Matlab	>25	6	>25
Julia	17	22	>25

These are the corresponding percentage scores. If the language does not appear in the corresponding list, I put “< X%”, where X is the percent score for the last position in the corresponding list. I rounded percents to the nearest integer.

	Loved	Dreaded	Wanted
Python	68%	<44%	25%
R	49%	51%	6%
Matlab	<42%	77%	<3%
Julia	53%	47%	<3%