It's interesting to play with their ranking editor. It really does highlight how variable some of these lists are depending on what you consider to be part of a "top" language.
For example, I'd personally completely remove stack overflow questions. It could mean a language is incredibly complex rather than important or commonly used.
Or it could be that the best resources for information about a specific language exist outside of stackoverflow; I think this is often the case with Rust, for instance, where I will generally turn to users.rust-lang.org, or IRC for questions that I would turn to SO for in other languages; and when I end up googling particular questions I more often end up at somebody's personal blog.
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It's interesting to play with their ranking editor. It really does highlight how variable some of these lists are depending on what you consider to be part of a "top" language.
For example, I'd personally completely remove stack overflow questions. It could mean a language is incredibly complex rather than important or commonly used.
Excellent point. For example, I almost never need to search or look up documentation for React.
But for Angular 2, I can't do anything without looking up the documentation (at least they did an excellent job writing it).
So I would say you are right that StackOverflow is a better indicator of complexity than popularity.
Or it could be that the best resources for information about a specific language exist outside of stackoverflow; I think this is often the case with Rust, for instance, where I will generally turn to users.rust-lang.org, or IRC for questions that I would turn to SO for in other languages; and when I end up googling particular questions I more often end up at somebody's personal blog.
Perl was also hit hard by this for awhile as it had its own PerlMonks site that was where people went until recently.