Programming Lollipops!

Here are two lollipop charts I made with information from Stack Overflow's 2024 Developer Survey; they are an extremely popular and respected platform for asking and answering inquiries about computer programming. These display the most used programming languages by professional developers. 

Quick note: this is not an endorsement of which one ought to learn; there are merits to learning a popular one (such as easy integration into a team and abundance of learning material and premade frameworks) and a rare one (irreplaceability and niche demand); ultimately, which is not important as the underlying problem-solving skills are more important than specific syntax. 

I only planned on making a vertical lollipop chart because I had previously saw others and felt convinced that seeing height differences would be easier than seeing length differences (but there was no scientific evidence for that). However, when I finished, I realized a technical issue where the labels of the programming languages on the bottom would be diagonal because of how many elements there were (which is common for lollipop charts), and the only reason the labels are not diagonal in that first picture is because I made the chart absurdly long. 

This horizontal lollipop chart is much easier to read while being more compact. 

So, why should a lollipop chart be used? First of all, consider that, on one hand, it is essentially a Cleveland dotplot, and on the other hand, it is a bar graph. What does that entail? As we have read in Chapter 1, according to Figure 1.5 and its scientific source which by the way Cleveland was a coauthor, position on a common scale (dotplot) and length (bar chart) were the two most accurate and failproof in terms of reader interpretation. Thus, I argue that we have a best of both worlds' situation here. Some may say that having both clutters the space and makes each less effective, but the stem of the lollipop is so thin that it's wrong to say it causes clutter and the head of the lollipop provides a great place to store a data label. Additionally, the thinness of the lollipop makes it great for datasets in which you feel the need to display many elements because an alternative bar chart would be massively overwhelming with so many thick bars; lollipops are also economical and environmental if you plan on printing these charts.