Top programming languages according to Hacker News

Mindshare = matching upvotes ÷ all eligible HN upvotes. The measure uses the story’s existing archive and title-matching rules. It covers 48 tracked language categories from January 2016 through August 2026, the latest complete month in this dataset.

Annual rankings pool the underlying monthly totals for each calendar year, rather than averaging percentages or adding overlapping rolling windows. 2026 covers January–August only; its connecting segment is dashed because the year is incomplete. Repeated URLs count once per UTC month, using their highest recorded matching score; the same URL in different months still counts in each month. “Upvotes” uses recorded HN scores as a proxy; these are score snapshots assigned to submission months, not counts of vote events during each month.

Ranks compare all 48 categories using exact shares. Equal positive scores share a rank, with the next position skipped; alphabetical ordering only arranges tied rows. Windows with no recorded upvotes have no rank and appear as gaps in the rank chart. Missing activity does not establish when a language was created.

The change columns compare ranks with the same months 1, 5 and 10 years earlier. Complete years compare with complete years; January–August 2026 compares with January–August 2025, 2021 and 2016, recalculated from those months. A plus sign means a rise in rank; 0 means no change. NR means one or both periods have no ranked score, while N/A means the comparison period is outside the dataset. Each cell’s tooltip and accessible label explain which period is affected. NR does not establish when a language was created. Displayed shares round to one decimal, with nonzero values below 0.05% shown as <0.1%.

Click a data-table column heading to sort all languages; click it again to reverse the order. Sorting uses exact values. Non-numeric rank changes and missing survey categories stay below numeric values in either direction, and ties use current upvotes followed by language name. The data table initially shows 20 rows on desktop and 12 on mobile, following the chosen sort. The compact language selector stays in HN rank order for the selected year.

Only titles are matched. Comments, article contents and most text-only submissions are absent. A title can name multiple languages, so shares overlap and should not be added together. Mindshare measures attention in this archive, not language adoption or community approval.

Stack Overflow comparison. HN covers the 2025 calendar year. The survey was collected May 29–June 23, 2025 and asked about the preceding year; the windows differ.

Both rankings use the same 42 main survey categories. HN ranks are recalculated within those categories, so they can differ from the 48-category ranking above. Clojure, Haskell, Julia, Nix, Objective-C and Odin are outside the survey’s main options and excluded here; write-in results are not comparable to prompted choices.

HN ranks use exact recorded upvotes; survey ranks use exact response counts, with equal values sharing a rank. Rank gap = survey rank minus HN rank. A positive gap means a higher HN position, not a multiple of interest or usage. Zero HN activity is unranked and omitted from the plot.

These measure different things: attention to language names in HN titles versus self-reported development usage among survey respondents. Survey usage is not the “admired” score, a count of Stack Overflow questions, or a representative estimate of all developers. The survey methodology describes recruitment, primarily through Stack Overflow’s own channels.

This comparison is fixed to HN 2025 and the 2025 survey, independently of the selected HN year. Survey data: Stack Overflow, Open Database License.