This shows rust being the most promoted language on HN, and not necessarily popular among its readership. I think js and python are likely to be more popular but less promoted.
I'm not a fan of rust at all, but I do like non-fankid posts and comments about it. It has a couple of good ideas at a cost I personally am not willing to endure, but still can learn from.
I follow and have written code in other languages like prolog, haskell, erlang and forth. I know I will never write any "real" code in any of them, and I'm not interested in the literature of those heavily involved (unlike C++ which I do follow semi-closely) but I am always interested when an article about them makes it to the HN front page. Same with rust.
On TIOBE, Julia (27) and Rust (20) are relatively close right now, and TIOBE might have some correlation to number of users. https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
And if you compare the IEEE to the TIOBE list, there appears to be a high degree of correlation. I think part of the criticism against TIOBE, is when people's favorite is not doing as well as they would like or a language they don't like is doing better than they expected.
The author of this tool commented below; Julia simply wasn't included in the list. Plugging it in gives it quite a high score compared to other languages (top ten in 2/3 categories).
Anecdotally, I feel like I see article "on" julia at least as often as rust on HN. I totally expected it to come "second" on most categories, and was very surprised not to see it there.
Then I realised that most julia articles would rarely introduce the julia component as "in Julia"; certaintly not in the same way that people tinkering with rust would be keen to report it as such. If anything I have noticed that most articles on Julia tend to be a bit backdoorish (i.e. the title is on, say, differentiation, but then you go to the article and it's basically an article about julia).
So I think it's just a side-effect of the methodology used to rank languages; not sure if it reflects actual market-share or the result of a vocal community engaging HN specifically, but julia definitely has a much stronger presence on HN than implied by this tool/article.
Depends if you mean popular as in most used or most liked. I think it's pretty clearly the most liked. It will probably never be the most used given the popularity of Python and JavaScript.
It sure is nice to have a really well designed language gaining popularity though. If I had to use Python and JavaScript for the rest of my life I think I might change careers.
I don't think "promoted" is the right way to look at it. That kind of implies some kind of paid marketing campaign, while as far as I can tell, the interest in Rust tends to be organic.
The thing is, Rust is a bit more novel and interesting than JavaScript or Python. They are both over 25 years old, well established, just about everyone has used or interacted with them. They come from somewhat similar language backgrounds, of dynamically typed garbage collected languages that try to be approachable, with optional static typing these days. Rust is much newer, only being publicly announced a bit over 10 years ago, and stable for seven years, and it offers some unique features that very few other languages outside of academia or very niche fields offer, while also being intended to actually be used as a production language, not just an academic curiosity.
This novelty and distinction makes Rust an interesting topic of discussion; not just for folks promoting it, but also skeptics of the approaches it takes. And Hacker News being a discussion site, it's not terribly surprising that a language that is novel, and polarizing, is discussed more often than ones that are pretty much ubiquitous at this point. That doesn't mean it's used more by HN users, but it certainly is discussed more, because it's more interesting to discuss.
