From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2006-09-27T13:31:33+09:00
Subject: Re: Computer Language Popularity Trend

Chung Leong wrote:
> xah@xahlee.org wrote:
>> This page gives a visual report of computer languages's popularity, as
>> indicated by their traffic level in newsgroups. This is not a
>> comprehensive or fair survey, but does give some indications of
>> popularity trends.
>>
>> http://xahlee.org/lang_traf/index.html
>>
>>   Xah
>>   xah@xahlee.org
>> ∑ http://xahlee.org/
> 
> These charts are a rather misleading I think. The number of newsgroup
> postings for a language is inversely proportional to the amount of the
> information about it on the internet. When someone can google an answer
> to his question, he's not going to start a thread. Thus activity in the
> newsgroup is bound to fall over time following a peak, even as interest
> in the language remains strong.

Yup ... it's unscientific but fun. On the other hand, a pretty good 
indicator is to go to a *non-technical* bookstore and measure 
shelf-inches of books in the programming language section. Up until this 
year, that metric showed Ruby as almost non-existent.

This metric does fail for Javascript, though. Shelf inches for 
Javascript are usually much lower than the usage of Javascript, mostly 
because there aren't many books about Javascript.