While the developer's decision must be respected, I don't really understand it. Why not simply ban the troll instead of engaging with them in any way? I wouldn't want to give a troll any power or influence at all.
It's still effort. If you have someone shitting up your PRs with personal complaints you can either put the effort in to squelch the opponent or you can just walk away. For unpaid FOSS work there is often very little to be gained except for a bit of self satisfaction and kudos from the community.
It's easy to walk away from an ungrateful community if you don't have gold in your pockets to soften the blows.
Alternatively, people can instead choose to NOT be dicks to people who are altruistically developing stuff for no compensation and the net benefit of our industry.
Yes. I think the author's point is that the standards are that low up here in North England, and outside of Manchester it's worse than in East Germany.
We must do something! This is something! Therefore we must do it!
That fucking mindset is what's going to kill the internet. I'm glad Daniel is resisting but like he says, he's but a small cog in a machine that's run by bean-counting idiots.
Except that Apple's computers aren't locked down. That canard really needs to die. iPhones and iPads are locked down. Macs aren't. I can run whatever the I want on my Mac, and I do.
I do agree with the original contention that it's just a proxy for popularity. All of the things that you just mentioned may be factors. But at the end: these factors are probabilities that are mixed together in a nonmonotonic way somehow, and then multiplied by the total number of people out there doing stuff with the langauge. I would expect that that latter aspect is the dominant one in determining the ranking by language.
I would expect advanced people to ask just as many questions as beginners (they just do more advanced stuff, and ask questions relating to more advanced things pertaining to the langauge). Good documentation does not stop people from asking questions, as questions are frequently asked to which "RTFM" is the answer. Schools? Actually pupils asking "do my homework" questions is probably a driver in the opposite direction.
I can't disagree with you because that's an issue of semantics. I would define "popularity" as the number of people using the language, regardless of skill level.
By that definition, I'd guess that Python is near the top due to its recent dominance in data science, but Stack Overflow isn't proving or disproving the idea either way.
Using my definition (and likely yours), JavaScript is certainly the most popular. But it's hard to discount the many huge organizations using Java and C#. Their beginners might not be using Stack Overflow as heavily because they have in-house mentorship.
