Ever wanted to know which languages are most popular late at night compared with early in the morning? Good news if so; Stack Overflow has released a series of usage figures which look at the times users visit questions on their system concerning various languages.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the languages most likely to be visited during the hours of 9-5 were based around enterprise technologies, many with a Microsoft theme; T-SQL at the top, with SharePoint, SQL Server 2008, PowerShell, and SQL Server behind.

Taking into account the 24-hour day, other Microsoft technologies – Excel, VBA, C# – rose quickest in the morning, and remained towards the top throughout the regular working day, before a shift towards mobile technologies, and C/C++. Haskell, a functional language, is an outlier in that its performance remains relatively strong until around 2200 and 2300.

Elsewhere, the figures found that C# programmers are more likely to start their day earlier, as well as finish earlier, while C programmers start and finish later. Not only this, they keep using the language in the evening – Stack Overflow argues this is most likely down to hobbyists, while the greater rigidity of C# is more to do with its frequent use in finance and enterprise software.

The figures were also segmented by city. When it came to 9 to 5, the most visits came as a rule from Western Europe, with London at the top followed by Paris, Manchester, and Madrid, while on the flip side Moscow, Quezon City, Tokyo and Seoul were among the most frequent visitors outside of working hours.

Yet these figures alone may not tell the whole story, as David Robinson, Stack Overflow Insights data scientist, explains. “Some developers in Quezon City may work for American or European companies and keep nocturnal hours to improve collaboration,” he wrote. “Moscow may be a similar case, where developers who work with American companies start later in the day.”

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