There are other languages and technologies that have been shrinking rapidly in this time period. Similarly, the "iphone" and "ipad" tags have been replaced by the general ios tags for questions about Apple's mobile platform (see our blog post on mobile development for more exploration of those trends or see iOS listings to explore job opportunities). Objective-C has been declining as well, since it's being replaced by Swift as the language of choice for iOS development. Questions about Ruby on Rails grew more frequent until about 2011, then they started a slow decline. Microsoft's ASP.NET web framework has been decreasing as a share of Stack Overflow questions since the founding of the site this may be skewed because the site started with a disproportionate number of C# developers, but it also may reflect a diminishing relevance of Microsoft in the web developer space. ![]() Flex is technically still officially supported (since 2011, by the Apache Foundation rather than by Adobe), but considering the deprecation of Flash, along with its diminished presence in developer questions, it's hard to say that it's a technology with a future.Īmong major technologies (those with at least 100,000 questions asked since 2010), there are a few that are shrinking to a noticeable extent. One of these is already deprecated: in 2015, Microsoft announced that they would stop supporting Silverlight by 2021. Each of these technologies has dropped by about two orders of magnitude in terms of their presence on the site. Both shrunk over time even faster than Flash did, with Flex showing a particularly sharp decline since its peak in 2010. Since 2010, the two fastest-shrinking tags on Stack Overflow were Flex (a Flash-based web application framework) and Microsoft's Silverlight. By that standard, what were the fastest-shrinking technologies? We considered a technology to be shrinking if questions about it declined by at least 10% per year, on average. ![]() This is public data (you can use this query to download it yourself), so I'd be interested in what others find. We considered the trend in the last five years (to include tags that were once growing, hit a peak, then started shrinking), and estimated the rate of decrease over time for each technology. Might there be other technologies that appear reasonably healthy, but have also been declining in the last few years? To answer this question, we looked at Stack Overflow questions posted over time, the same data behind the Trends tool. What technology might be next to die?įlash has had its defenders over the last decade ( here's some historical context), even though its decline in developer activity was apparent since about 2011. ![]() If we would have been able to see Flash's decline in advance, what other technologies might be past their peak? Here we'll use Stack Overflow data to dive into this question. This sudden shift in Flash's fortune suggests there's truth to the conventional wisdom that Apple "killed" Flash by not supporting it on the iPad in 2010. One notable source of such data is in our Stack Overflow Trends tool, which shows questions about Flash have been declining in frequency since 2010. You can often see the decline of a technology in advance, by examining data on its usage in the software development community. But in other ways it was a long time coming. In some ways this is surprising: I still sometimes run into pages that require Flash, and you can still find a few defenders of the platform in the software development community. ![]() Last week, Adobe announced that they would stop supporting Flash by 2020.
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