You have to have some metrics from somewhere to be able to understand which languages are being used.

SO is one data point, but there are certainly others.

GitHub is probably a better source. SO is self selecting for people asking questions about something, not actually using it. A “harder” thing might have more SO questions, so it isn’t representative of actual usage.

I posted above, but you can also see:

You get the same result from scraping job postings: https://www.devjobsscanner.com/blog/top-8-most-demanded-prog...

    1. JS/TS (note these two are collapsed)
    2. Python
    3. Java
    4. C#

Two datapoints, completely discrete, same result.

It tells me which languages have people asking questions about them. That metric is useful only if it's normalized around how many people are using that language, but we don't have that metric.