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Python's popularity statistics

Erik Max Francis max at alcyone.com
Wed Dec 11 22:34:22 EST 2002 
"Aaron K. Johnson" wrote:

> Yes...let me be more precise. I'm not saying that there is a
> coefficient x by
> which you can multiply the number of posts to comp.lang.python and get
> the
> magic number of python programmers. What I am saying is that in some
> real way,
> the greater the number of comp.lang.python posts, the greater its
> overall
> presence and use. Dig?

Probably.  Greater activity (non-spam activity, anyway; the raw numbers
don't give that) probably indicates greater popularity.  But what people
are rightly telling you is that the relation between newsgroup traffic
and the popularity of its language may not be the same for each
newsgroup.

In other words, even if there's a strong positive correlation between a
language and its newsgroup traffic, that doesn't mean that the raw
traffic figures for different newsgroups are comparable in a way that
correlates to their relative popularity.

So that, for an example, comp.lang.c++ (I presume that it's
comp.lang.c++ itself and not its moderated cousin) gets 2.8 times as
much (raw) traffic as comp.lang.python doesn't really tell you anything
quantitatively about the relative popularity of C++ to Python, because
the factors involved with correlating a language's popularity to its
newsgroup probably aren't (and I'd say almost certainly aren't) the same
for different languages.

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