Have a grain of salt handy? Then you’re ready for the results of Red Canary’s experiment in mass prognostication.

(if you’re looking for the original survey, it’s here)

The surprises:
—People from all over the wold took this survey. Word travels fast – and far.
—Someone gave Cobol ten stars.
—Despite not being a true language, HTML/CSS did exceptionally well. Why?

The not-so-suprising:
—There’s a partisan correlation between sociodemographic, geography and favoured programming language. Our enterprise-leaning Canadian submissions bumped up Java and C#, Californians coming from yCombinator voted strongly for AJAX, and European ‘pythonistas’ pushed their choice to the #1 spot.
—Cobol received the most “1 star” votes.

The merely interesting:
—Twice as many people assigned a “1 star” rating as a “10 star” rating.
—Only 61 people assigned a “9 star” rating. It was the least popular choice by a factor of nearly 2.

Average Rating

I’ll keep this open for a good while longer. We’ll see where we are in a few months.

Here’s the complete list as of October 4th, 2007
If you’d like to see the complete chart with voting percentages, go here