From: Josef 'Jupp' SCHUGT Date: 2003-11-29T08:55:56+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby advertisement article [Computerwoche] Hi! * Tobias Peters; 2003-11-28, 14:19 UTC: [Given that first three years Matz did Ruby development all alone then with the help of others, presently nearly 40 people. How many man years of development did go into Ruby?] > Then of course it's 3 + (40 + 1) * 0.5 * (10 - 3) = 146.5 man years. Let me see if I correctly understand that formula. In the first three years Matz did work all alone. This gives 3 * 1 = 3 man years. In the remaining time - this is the factor (10 - 3) the number of contributors did raise linearly from 1 to 40 which means an average number of contributors of (40 + 1) / 2. Let's see what we get if we assume an exponential growth. The number then grew from 1=0^log7(40) to 40=7^log7(40). 3 + int(0,7,x^{log7 40},dx) = 100 (actually 99.69...) Besides that theoretical issue there is also a practical one: A contribution may be tiny or huge. So the effective number of the present number of contributors may range from 1 + epsilon to 1 + 40. Without doing actual measurements the numbers computed are just numbers but do not provide any insight. Josef 'Jupp' Schugt -- .-------. message > 100 kB? / | | sender = spammer? / | R.I.P.| text = spam? / ___| |___