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Python use growing or shrinking

Laura Creighton lac at strakt.com
Fri Jan 24 06:47:58 EST 2003 
> Terry Hancock wrote:
> 
> > Yeah, maybe I should've mentioned that -- one might try to think of
> > these
> > numbers as being percentages of "all software development pages", but
> > of
> > course, they're not. It's just a percentage of the pages listed.  It
> > might
> > make more sense to scale relative to one representative member. But
> > which
> > one?
> 
> It's a good question.  Perhaps the arithmetic mean, geometric mean, or
> even the median of all of them.  Perhaps even the results of the top
> ranker, and then everything is represented as a percentile of the front
> (again, not percentage of the total, but percentage of the front
> runner).  The latter has the benefit of being totally impervious to the
> addition of new elements (unless, of course, when added they rank first
> :-).
> 

This is not the sort of question that lends itself to finding a
'representative number'.  Web pages do not happen according to any
natural distribution, thus they are 100% convenience sampling.  See:
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=probability+group:comp.lang.python+author:Laura&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=mailman.989501536.31814.python-list%40python.org&rnum=1

for the last time I díscussed this here ....

Laura Creighton
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