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Python's popularity statistics

Erik Max Francis max at alcyone.com
Wed Dec 11 23:31:02 EST 2002 
"Aaron K. Johnson" wrote:

> But wouldn't a correlation from freshmeat open source project language
> use
> stats with my initial hunch about newsgroup density indicate
> something?

One should immediately realize that projects listed in Freshmeat would
be a pretty biased sample, but it's at least probably better correlated
with popularity for use in projects rather than popularity for
discussion.

> There is a strong correlation between newsgroup stats and freshmeat
> project
> stats. I think it speaks for itself :) (one thing we can observe is
> that,
> compared with their place relatively high on the news stats list, Lisp
> programmers talk more about lisp than they program in it, at least
> open source)

I'm not really sure what correlation you're referring to, except perhaps
that "Python, Java, Perl, C, and C++ are all popular languages," but
that's a statement I don't think you'd have found too much dispute with
in the first place.  In fact, using both of your methods, one would come
up with almost the reverse ranking of their popularity.

I think all you're hearing is that the relative popularity of these
languages is a really complex relationship, and is not something you're
going to be able to summarize quantitatively with an easily-found
statistic.

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