Method
The "Stack Overflow Representation" represents a ratio of the SO tag count (as a percent of total questions) divided by the TIOBE language index percent. Where a representation of 100% means that the SO tag count is aligned exactly with the TIOBE language index. An "over-representation", greater than 100%, might mean there's a greater number of questions on SO than we'd expect. An "under-representation", lower than 100%, might mean there's not as many questions on SO than we'd expect.
Results
Suprisingly, JavaScript came out to be the most "over-represented" language on SO, by quite a long way at 294%. Could this also be because programming JavaScript is generally quite difficult and will result in people seeking help more often? Following this was C# (which I had expected to be number 1), at 153%. After this, PHP, Ruby and Python were basically fairly balanced at around 100%. The most "under-represented" major language would definitely be C at 11%. Three other major languages which seemed to be a bit under-represented, below 50%, were C++, Java and Objective-C.
Data Sources:
- Stack Overflow data taken from: StackOverflow.com/tags - data snapshot taken at 2:50am UTC, 6-Nov-2011. Total tag count was 2,254,639.
- TIOBE data taken from: latest available (October 2011) at www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
