# I've heard a number of people say Julia is not mainstream because it doesn't have many stackoverflow questions answered but they don't know about discourse

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/ive-heard-a-number-of-people-say-julia-is-not-mainstream-because-it-doesnt-have-many-stackoverflow-questions-answered-but-they-dont-know-about-discourse/53168>\
**Category:** Teaching & Outreach\
**Created:** [January 11, 2021, 5:25pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/ive-heard-a-number-of-people-say-julia-is-not-mainstream-because-it-doesnt-have-many-stackoverflow-questions-answered-but-they-dont-know-about-discourse/53168 "2021-01-11T17:25:20Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
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**Author:** ![giordano](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/giordano/32/2166_2.png) [@giordano](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/giordano)\
**Post date:** [January 11, 2021, 8:57pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/ive-heard-a-number-of-people-say-julia-is-not-mainstream-because-it-doesnt-have-many-stackoverflow-questions-answered-but-they-dont-know-about-discourse/53168/7 "2021-01-11T20:57:00Z")

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> [@samerb](#):
>
> because it doesn’t have many stackoverflow questions answered.

This is inaccurate. The Julia tag on StackOverflow doesn’t have many questions _asked_. The ratio of unanswered questions is remarkably low, compared to tags of the same volume, and way lower compared to the top tags. If you want some numbers, see for example

> [@\#Helpdesk channel on Slack (proposal to close the channel)](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/helpdesk-channel-on-slack-proposal-to-close-the-channel/47697/45):
>
> I really don’t understand the critics about Julia tag in StackOverflow, it has a remarkably low fraction of unanswered questions, [14.7% as of this writing](https://stackoverflow.com/tags/julia/topusers). For comparison, among the [top 20 tags](https://stackoverflow.com/tags), only [[c++]](https://stackoverflow.com/tags/c%2b%2b/topusers), [[arrays]](https://stackoverflow.com/tags/arrays/topusers) and [[c]](https://stackoverflow.com/tags/c/topusers) come close with 19.5%, 18.2% and 16.8%, all others float around 25-35% of unanswered questions. This means that if someone does ask a question, it’s more likely they get an answer if it’s about Julia than any of the most popular languages. I feel like all people that compl…

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