39

My Sunday afternoon project this weekend was to add a bit of jQuery pixie dust to the tag trend graph page. The new Stack Overflow Tag Trends page allows you to choose which tags to compare and produces a graph interactively. You can also capture a link to a particular graph, for example the history for the homework tag is amusing.

Available tags are those that have been used for 100 or more questions (1835 tags total at the moment).

Here's a recent newsworthy graph:

Improve this question
  • Wow, pretty awesome. – Sam152 Mar 7 '10 at 13:42
  • @Greg Hewgill: why is Forth excluded? Today I tried with these four tags: jquery python django forth. Forth is not a very active tag, but still. – P.Mort. - forgot Clay Shirky_q Mar 13 '10 at 22:01
  • @Greg Hewgill Can you update the data? It look a little outdated. – Horcrux7 Aug 31 '11 at 11:26
  • 1
    @Horcrux7: I fixed the post, it was pointing to old links. The top level stats page (for all SE sites) is: hewgill.com/~greg/stackoverflow – Greg Hewgill Aug 31 '11 at 19:37
  • I think it's informative to see how few Facebook questions there are in comparison to Android questions, especially with all the recent discussion about Facebook.SO. And @Greg, yer links are broken! :) – Chris Frederick Aug 31 '11 at 20:20
  • @Chris: Your link is broken, I had already fixed the one in the post :) – Greg Hewgill Sep 1 '11 at 8:57
  • Well, yes. . .but I copied the link directly from the [link] button on your site. Did I do something wrong? – Chris Frederick Sep 1 '11 at 17:24
  • @Chris: My apologies, you are quite right. The [link] button should be fixed now. – Greg Hewgill Sep 1 '11 at 19:22
  • 2
    Could you re-run your scripts to update the graphs with the data since 2012? – oli_obk Jul 22 '15 at 10:05
  • Some tags are missing, is there anything we can do about that? – Michał Miszczyszyn Apr 23 '16 at 21:20
7

Nice piece of work, @Greg Hewgill.

It will be interesting to see how the the numbers develop as Stack Overflow trends towards a more industry-wide audience.

See, the problem with these "growth rates" is that they reflect primarily the growth of Stack Overflow, not the industry in general. Stack Overflow started with a disproportionately strong .NET presence because of Joel's and Jeff's influence in drawing the initial audience.

So when you see a percentage gain in technologies like PHP or a percentage loss in .NET, that doesn't (necessarily) reflect anything more than the normalization of Stack Overflow's audience coming more in line with the true developer population.

Improve this answer
0

Absolutely cool. And intriguing. Yay for the low number of bugs on Meta :O)

enter image description here

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .