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saltcured 4 hours ago

I have very mixed feelings on this topic, starting with how you quantify and weigh something like "most used" for a programming language. To me, the claim feels almost as much a non sequitur as saying the most used building material in the western world is Legos blocks or Play-Doh...

Is the most used bridge-building technique a plank over a small culvert, or the properly engineered bridge that carries constant, multi-lane highway traffic for a century? How do we weigh the usage of resulting products into the usage of a design and production method? Should we consider the number of program users? The users X hours of usage?

Fundamentally, the software field is still just so young and we haven't teased apart the "obvious" different domains and domain rules that we have for production of different material goods. In some sense, the domains and domain rules for material goods emerge out of the connection to culture, economic roles, health, and safety aspects. Whether it falls into civil engineering, building codes, transporation rules, consumer product safety, food and drug, ...

The self-similar way that software can be composed into systems also makes it confusing to categorize. Imagine if we talked about other crafts the same way, and conflated textile manufacturing, clothing design, tailoring, costume making, wardrobe management, scripting, choreography, acting, and dancing as a single field that coordinates the visual movement of fabric on a stage.