

Google AI Challenge: Languages Used by the Best Programmers - EzGraphs
http://www.r-chart.com/2010/12/google-ai-challenge-languages-used-by.html

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jackfoxy
Too many colors, too close together in hue, and the hue adjusts not by how the
languages are related, but by alpha sorting of the language names.

Terrible info graphic! I'm sure I could do much better in 10 minutes, and I'm
a rank amateur. Someone has not read Tufte.

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jrockway
Pretty sure he just typed them into R and pasted the result into his blog. How
much time should someone spend on a blog post being provided for free?

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adambyrtek
Agreed, you can publish anything you like on your "provided for free" blog,
but if you want anybody to care you should definitely put some effort into
that. See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1963612>

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LiveTheDream
The contrast in the combined graph makes it impossible to distinguish a single
language.

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Splines
Suggestion: Lose the shading, and use a wider palette on the lines.

It would be nice if it was a "live" graph where you could toggle languages
on/off.

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nowarninglabel
I wonder why does the author refer to C programmers as 'hippies'? I sometimes
use C, and I have been called a hippie, but I have never been called a hippie
_because_ I use C. But perhaps I am not hip to where this originates.

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cturner
> I sometimes use C

Ah - but - had you entered this, would you have choosen to use C?

My anecdotal experience (Given a problem, and C, I struggle to get things
done) is that lots of people like the idea of C, have fond memories of it and
occasionally play with code snippets in it. But when those people go into
getting-things-done-mode they choose C++ or Java as their primary.

But there are some die-hards who think C remains a superior general-purpose
lanuage to C++ and Java, who probably don't like OO, and who stick with C.

I thought the writer called them hippy to highlight this spirit of
contrarianism. If that's true, though, it's a poor choice of word because it
doesn't suggest a connection with either tradition or asceticism. 'Monk' would
better capture that.

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gdl
I'm amazed that Python had about 20 times as many entries as either Perl or
Ruby. I realize they each have their own niches and that Python tends to be
the current language of choice for a lot of general-purpose weekend hacking,
but I wouldn't have expected the difference to be that overwhelming.

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nowarninglabel
Python seems to be pretty popular for AI. This is a shot in the dark but could
have something to do with the popularity of "Programming Collective
Intelligence". It uses and teaches Python and is a top seller in the AI
category on Amazon
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596529325?ie=UTF8&tag=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596529325?ie=UTF8&tag=nowarlab-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0596529325)

I have really enjoyed going through the examples in that book, which was the
first time I did any AI (although one might argue it's light on the AI side)
type stuff since doing some Lisp stuff way long ago.

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noahlt
Norvig's Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach also has Python code
examples.

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gte910h
Oh wow, do you know what edition started doing that?

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rgarcia
These results are potentially biased by the fact that starter packages were
originally only available for C++, Java, and Python (at least when I took a
look at it back when the competition started)

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gte910h
What a horrid graph. I wish I could read that.

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EzGraphs
Was kind of interested if PG's assertion about Java being for "average"
programmers and Lisp (and some other languages) being for "good
programmers..."

It seems like there is a trend that way - and C and Haskell are also for
"good" programmers.

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kaffiene
Actually, the results showed that there were a much greater range of Java
programmer abilities than most other languages. There were more Java
programmers in the top 10 than any other language, so asserting that Java is
just for 'average' programmers is rather shown up for the baseless snobbery
that I rather suspect is PG's basic attitude.

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route66
Maybe I'm misrepresenting Graham's remark concerning averageness of languages,
but I the 'average' attribute was not assigned to the capabilities of the
individual programmer. The point was (among others) that languages with a good
"market position" attracts all kind of programmers, from challenged to geek.
On the other side you have languages who attract more geeks because the
i-have-to-pay-my-mortgage-which-language-should-i-learn group is
underrepresented. Which makes for a good filter if you want to hire people.
Just like "participating in open source projects" can be a discriminating
factor.

The last point could be argued about, but I don't recall language bashing in
said essay.

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ses
No Prolog, how sad! I suspect there wouldn't be a particularly high frequency
of developers using it anyway but it would be nice to know what proportion do
given a larger study.

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adambyrtek
According to the TIOBE Index[1] about 0.3%.

[1]
[http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....](http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html)

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kenjackson
Interesting how Python goes from 20 in the top 100, to 0 in the top 10. Java,
C++, and C# seem to scale all the way down to the top 10.

Lisp won, but maybe the question is, is there something wrong with Python?

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jamesaguilar
It is impossible to tell which color is which in this graph.

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rokamic
Oh that is awesome. Anyone know if there are plans for another tournament?

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aerique
<http://ai-contest.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=8080#p8080>

Hopefully not as long as this one (3 months).

