You just gave me a new frame for thinking about a few things I'd already learned, as well as some interesting leads on questions I didn't even know to ask. Thank you!
Cities are cool to think about for that reason. They're formed because it's more efficient logistically for all these economic actors to come together. However, they're unpleasant (in some ways, but not others) to live in because of side effects of the same processes: concentrated noise, pollution, etc.
Even if I accepted these calculations, I still have to work a 40 hour week. I can't optimize time spent on my profession, time spent on life maintenance, and leisure time. So I just work with what I have left over, and given these constraints I choose not to change my own oil, sure as I am I could do it.
Some possible confounding variables:
what if certain language users are more likely to squash commits?
what if certain language users are more likely to have private repos?
I don't think squashed commits matter since they used project byte size as a filter to get rid of "Hello World" sized noise.
Hard to tell how much private repos would sway the results. Maybe a large number of COBOL programmers are stuck behind their organization's private repos and all we see are the languages they play with on the side for fun?
I think it could make a pretty large difference, actually. Languages like JavaScript (I know it's not included here, but still), Ruby and Python have large open source communities creating time of libraries in common usage. Compare that with a language like C#, which has an extensive standard library and comparatively less open source third party libraries. You'd expect that even if there was an equivalent number of private repos in both cases, the languages with a larger open source ecosystem would appear more popular in this analysis.
I enjoy programming games and other things as a hobby, but the work can fall short of your points especially in my experience in web development:
2. After days of work, your entire branch can be discarded when the feature spec changes
4. Repetitive tasks abound
5. Not so much creating from pure thoughtstuff, but rather intractable legacy codebases on top of bothersome system configuration
Your last quote sounds nice, but ignores the reality of coding. Even good coders have to write ugly (hard to maintain regardless of data structures) code sometimes. The real world just introduces edge cases which make even the most beautiful system have warts in places. Web development exposes concurrency, scaling and other things which can lead to tradeoffs against code cleanliness.
