\u003Cimg class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-8880\" src=\"https://stackoverflow.blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/tag_by_weekday_weekend_graph-1-1080x675.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1024\" height=\"640\" />\n\nTo explain this a bit more, let's look at some numbers. The programming language Haskell makes up 0.365% of weekend questions in this dataset, but only 0.21% of weekday questions, showing it is unusually popular on weekends. Sharepoint makes up 0.0683% of weekend questions, and 0.188% of weekday questions, showing it is more often used on weekdays.\n\nIt brings me great delight that the functional programming language Haskell leads up the weekend-shifted technologies, because this is basically me:\n\n\u003Cimg class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-5680\" src=\"https://stackoverflow.blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/7k8tN.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"368\" />\u003Cimg class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-8879\" src=\"https://stackoverflow.blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/learn_haskell.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"368\" />\n\nI haven't learned Haskell. But kudos to all of you who are using your weekends to do so! And now enjoy \u003Ca href=\"https://xkcd.com/1312/\">this joke\u003C/a> about Haskell, which is a language popular among academics and mathematicians but not typically used in corporate environments.\n\nLet's make some other observations!\n\n\u003Cul>\n \u003Cli>We see some low-level technologies are popular on weekends, such as C, C++, pointers, and assembly, as well as tags related to math, such as algorithm, recursion, and (of course) math.\u003C/li>\n \u003Cli>Heroku and Meteor are app platforms often used for rapid prototyping, which may suggest they are being used for weekend hobbyist projects.\u003C/li>\n \u003Cli>Many of the weekday-shifted technologies are connected to Microsoft, including tags related to Excel, SQL Server, VBA, and T-SQL. Others include enterprise technologies such as Oracle.\u003C/li>\n\u003C/ul>\n\nWe can also visualize these relationships by comparing the total number of questions to the relative frequencies.\n\n\u003Cimg class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-5679\" src=\"https://stackoverflow.blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/sdFa6.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"622\" />\u003Cimg class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-8881\" src=\"https://stackoverflow.blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/tag_by_weekday_weekend_scatter-1-868x675.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"868\" height=\"675\" />\n\nTags that are further to the right in this plot (JavaScript, Java, C#, PHP, etc.) have more questions asked about them, and tags that are further to the left have fewer questions asked about them. Tags that appear close to the dashed line have about an equal share of weekend questions as weekday questions, and tags that are farthest from the dashed line exhibit the largest weekend/weekday differences.\n\nWe can see again that most of the popular tags that are weekday-shifted are connected to Microsoft (C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server, Excel, VBA) and many of the weekend-shifted tags include technologies like C and C++, as well as newer languages such as Swift and Node.js.\n\n\u003Ch2 id=\"working-for-the-weekend\">Working for the weekend\u003C/h2>\n\nWe can also use this dataset to examine how developers have changed how they use these technologies over time. We can use modeling to find the tags whose weekend proportion (the percentage of questions that are asked on the weekend) has changed the most over time. For tags with more than 20,000 questions, which ones are being posted about less on weekends now compared to the past?\n\n\u003Cimg class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-5678\" src=\"https://stackoverflow.blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/TjFxX.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"500\" />\u003Cimg class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-8877\" src=\"https://stackoverflow.blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/decreasing-1-1080x675.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1024\" height=\"640\" />\n\nWe see tags here like Ruby on Rails and Scala that developers used at a higher rate on weekends several years ago, but now use at a lower rate on weekends and more on weekdays. These technologies were more weekend-oriented in the past, but are now proportionally part of more developers' weekday work lives. The version control system SVN also decreased in weekend use over these years; most likely the advent of GitHub (launched in 2008) has led to fewer people using SVN to manage code for personal weekend projects.\n\n\u003Cimg class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-5677\" src=\"https://stackoverflow.blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/LUQei.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"500\" />\u003Cimg class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-8878\" src=\"https://stackoverflow.blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/increasing-1-1080x675.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1024\" height=\"640\" />\n\nIf we look for the tags that have increased the most in weekend activity, we see the game engine Unity3D, as well as a number of tags used for building mobile apps. It looks like developers are designing more games and apps on the weekends now than in previous years. A good way to spend a weekend!\n\nWe used \u003Ca href=\"https://www.kaggle.com/stackoverflow/stacklite\">openly accessible data\u003C/a> to do this analysis, and look forward to seeing what other developers in our community may find by exploring the data products that we make available.\n\nDo you follow these patterns in your weekend language choices? You could make the jump to weekday use by finding \u003Ca href=\"https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/developer-jobs-using-c++?utm_source=so-owned&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=dev-c4al&utm_content=c4al-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">jobs in C++\u003C/a> or \u003Ca href=\"https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/developer-jobs-using-nodejs?utm_source=so-owned&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=dev-c4al&utm_content=c4al-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Node.js\u003C/a> over at Stack Overflow Jobs.","html","2017-02-07T15:02:29.000Z",{"current":277},"what-programming-languages-weekends",[279,287],{"_createdAt":280,"_id":281,"_rev":282,"_type":283,"_updatedAt":280,"slug":284,"title":286},"2023-05-23T16:43:21Z","wp-tagcat-insights","9HpbCsT2tq0xwozQfkc4ih","blogTag",{"current":285},"insights","Insights",{"_createdAt":280,"_id":288,"_rev":282,"_type":283,"_updatedAt":280,"slug":289,"title":291},"wp-tagcat-stackoverflow",{"current":290},"stackoverflow","Stackoverflow","What Programming Languages Are Used Most on Weekends?",[294,300,306,312],{"_id":295,"publishedAt":296,"slug":297,"sponsored":12,"title":299},"370eca08-3da8-4a13-b71e-5ab04e7d1f8b","2025-08-28T16:00:00.000Z",{"_type":10,"current":298},"moving-the-public-stack-overflow-sites-to-the-cloud-part-1","Moving the public Stack Overflow sites to the cloud: Part 1",{"_id":301,"publishedAt":302,"slug":303,"sponsored":266,"title":305},"e10457b6-a9f6-4aa9-90f2-d9e04eb77b7c","2025-08-27T04:40:00.000Z",{"_type":10,"current":304},"from-punch-cards-to-prompts-a-history-of-how-software-got-better","From punch cards to prompts: a history of how software got better",{"_id":307,"publishedAt":308,"slug":309,"sponsored":12,"title":311},"65472515-0b62-40d1-8b79-a62bdd2f508a","2025-08-25T16:00:00.000Z",{"_type":10,"current":310},"making-continuous-learning-work-at-work","Making continuous learning work at work",{"_id":313,"publishedAt":314,"slug":315,"sponsored":12,"title":317},"1b0bdf8c-5558-4631-80ca-40cb8e54b571","2025-08-21T14:00:25.054Z",{"_type":10,"current":316},"research-roadmap-update-august-2025","Research roadmap update, August 2025",{"count":319,"lastTimestamp":320},208,"2024-03-18T13:53:47Z",["Reactive",322],{"$sarticleModal":323},false,["Set"],["ShallowReactive",326],{"sanity-L8UH6Rnp-oGgTn5auzWJjj-kyIMIZgApYp5V9F-s7Nk":-1,"sanity-comment-wp-post-5674-1756687511409":-1},"/2017/02/07/what-programming-languages-weekends"]