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Python's popularity statistics

Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters mertz at gnosis.cx
Mon Dec 16 14:00:04 EST 2002 
Aaron K. Johnson <akjmicro at yahoo.com> wrote previously:
|We could safely assume from the law of large numbers that a
|fairly accurate estimate of the relative (no absolute number is ever possible)
|user base of each language could be established from that, no? Unless you
|somehow think that different languages for some reason have different likely
|percentage of users to posters....

OF COURSE wildely different percentages of users of different langugages
will be posters.  It could hardly be otherwise.

Just as some extreme examples:

 - Logo is designed largely to teach programming to children.  Not very
   many of them will post.  Some of their teachers probably will, but
   the poster/user ratio is almost certainly lower.

 - Cobol has a very high long-term/new user ratio.  I think it is quite
   likely that long-term users of a language like Cobol will not post as
   often.  Long-term pythoneers -do- post, but the nature of the
   language and the discussion about it is different in a way that makes
   this make sense.

 - Visual Basic/C## are MS-proprietary technologies (close enough for
   this point; I know about Mono, RealBASIC, etc) that have some
   discussion areas run by MS.  When discussion is directed to places
   other than Usenet the poster/user ratio on Usenet is lower.

 - A very new/experimental language will have almost all the users as
   posters.  Something rough enough around the edges, or just
   sufficiently academically sophisticated, will require a level of
   involvement and expertise beyond "normal" languages.

And so on.  Now it MIGHT be the case that the ratios are fairly
consistent between say, Java, C, C++, Perl, Python, Ruby.  None of those
are "special" in the ways I listed.  But it is not obvious that smaller,
but systematic, posting-ratio differences do not exist in this set.

Yours, Lulu...

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