
Job trends: Erlang, Lisp and Haskell - MaysonL
http://www.wagerlabs.com/blog/2008/08/job-trends-erlang-lisp-and-haskell.html
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mechanical_fish
This is a great statistics lesson. All that's happening here is that the
Erlang number is more volatile than the other numbers because the absolute
number of samples is so low for Erlang. See the following, much better graph:

<http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=lisp%2C+haskell%2C+erlang>

As you can see, there are literally three times more job ads that mention Lisp
than Erlang, and 1.5 times more _Haskell_ job ads, little did I know. And
Erlang went from 0.0005% to 0.002%, which is indeed a very high growth _rate_
\-- but what happened here is that we went from 10 or 20 or Erlang ads to 80
or 100. [1] With numbers that small, no wonder the fluctuations are so large.

Of course, given that I wouldn't dream of hiring an Erlang programmer by
posting an online job ad, I doubt these numbers are worth much anyway. But, to
the extent that they are worth something, they're not _bad_ news for Erlang
fans.

[1] Indeed.com claims to index "millions of jobs". 0.0005% of two million is
10.

~~~
BrandonM
_...and 1.5 times more Haskell job ads, little did I know._

From the submission comments: [http://mult.ifario.us/p/there-are-apparently-
lots-of-haskell...](http://mult.ifario.us/p/there-are-apparently-lots-of-
haskell-jobs)

~~~
mechanical_fish
Nice catch. Allow me to double down on the "numbers not worth much"
observation.

------
Hexstream
Obscurity --> Hype explosion (omg how to take advantage of all those cores in
CPUs and in the cloud?!) --> Attenuation --> Stabilisation.

Seems typical.

~~~
BrandonM
Especially when you realize that the graph is for growth in postings and not
number of postings.

In other words, if there was 1 Erlang posting one month and 15 the next, that
would be a 1400% growth. At the same time, there could be 400 Lisp postings
and then 500 the next month (100 new postings as compared to 14), and that
would only be a 25% growth

------
gaius
Some of that is just going to be people who read the Python Paradox.

