From: Curt Hibbs <curt@...>
Date: 2004-05-06T21:37:59+09:00
Subject: Re: [OT]Is Ruby Top 1 of Programming Languages that are Loved?

Curt Hibbs wrote:
>
> Park Heesob wrote:
> >
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Here is an article about Programming Languages that are Loved.
> > http://bluebones.net/news/default.asp?action=view_story&story_id=81
> >
> > It shows Ruby is Top 1.
> > But it warns that Ruby's outstanding result should not be taken too
> > seriously.
>
> Actually, if you look at the comments that I just posted to that
> thread, my
> (unscientific) addition indicates that you *can* take the Ruby results
> seriously -- by a lot!
>
> Here's what I wrote:
>
>   I just used Google to search for "I love Ruby"
>   (with the double quotes to search for the phrase),
>   and I got 2,750 hits. I went through the first
>   hundred hits and found 60% of them to be referring
>   to the programming language. Extrapolating, this
>   gives 1,650 real hits.
>
>   When I search for "I hate ruby" (again, with the
>   quotes) I get 58 hits. Only one of them was about
>   the programming language -- even then, it said "its
>   not that I hate ruby..." But I'll count it anyway
>   because the same could happen for the other languages.
>
>   So this actually boosts Ruby's ratio to 1,650. That's
>   16.5 times higher than Python!
>
> Ahhh... the satisfaction of being validated!

I just did the same same quasi-scientific analysis of the Python hits (the
#2 entry in the list), and found fewer false hits than for Ruby (almost all
of the false hits were references to Monty Python). But adjusting Python for
the false hits actually dropped Python below C#.

Here's what I posted:

  Just to continue the fun with the #2 entry, I did
  the same sort of rough analysis with the love/hate
  python.

  For "I love python" I got 762 hits. Checking out the
  first hundred, only 7 were false hits (all but one
  were references to Monty Python). For "I hate python"
  there were 86 hits, and 2 were false hits (also for
  Monty Python).

  This give Python an adjusted ratio of 755:84 or 8.98.
  This adjusted ratio for Python actually drops it
  slightly below C#.

  Its unlikely that love/hate C# is going to get false
  hits (i'm not going to look at this one). The only
  thing I can think of is the musical note C# -- but
  why would someone love or hate a particular note?

Curt