R Amongst Most Popular Programming Languages

Data Scientist Drew Conway tackles the problem of deciding which programming languages are the most popular in an interesting way: by comparing the number of projects tagged in GitHub with each language, and the number of questions in StackOverflow about the language. The former is a measure of how often a language is used (though, mainly for open source projects); the latter is a measure of how many programmers are asking questions about it. Drew uses these measures and a k-means clustering technique to categorize langauges as follows: Most Popular (generally ranked in the highest 20% of languages in StackOverflow…

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