

Programming Language and Development Tool Popularity by Actual Reported Usage - danielcer
http://www.appliedstacks.com/Popularity/

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davidw
A nitpick (I emailed him, too). LangPop.com does _not_ use recorded
conversations. I only look at how many people are on channels. I don't want
people thinking that they're being "spied on".

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danielcer
Fixed.

Sorry, about that. I misread your method the first time around.

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j_baker
These are always fun to read, but it's always so difficult to believe them.
There are so many different ways to measure them and different surveys always
yield totally different results.

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davidw
Actually, _most_ of my results at LangPop.com reinforce one another. Where
they don't, explanations are usually simple and direct (Freshmeat and
Ohloh.net don't have lots of non-open source stuff). So I think that generally
these things do correspond to reality, albeit roughly.

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carbon8
Warning: this is only based on user-submitted, apparently unverified reports
about a miniscule (<1000) number of sites.

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danielcer
Hm... no.

I think you're just looking at the number of entries on the 'newest first'
list. However, if you take a look at the number of entries for PHP alone
there's thousands of individual websites.

The results are based on self reports. However, assuming wiki spam is kept to
a minimum, the results should be at least as credible as other heuristic
measures, if not more so.

(Disclaimer: I'm the guy who put together rankings page)

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carbon8
OK, "18000+". Same thing in this context.

Beyond that, there are a range of flaws with self reporting that are
immediately apparent when you look at the entries and rankings. Most entries
are grossly incomplete, and they are all very inconsistent. Some say "PHP"
some just say "wordpress" others just say nothing more than something like
"postgresql." The result is that "PHP" in the rankings doesn't actually
represent PHP, even among the small number of sites that have been listed in
your app.

Furthermore, when I looked an hour ago, Erlang was ranked higher than Ruby,
and now, apparently, "Django" represents 10% of the entries and "Ruby on
Rails" is ranked much higher than "Wordpress," which is ranked just above
"Rails," all of which are well above "JavaScript," "HTML" and "Linux." And so
on.

Normally I'd like to see any indie web app succeed and appreciate the time and
effort involved in making one, but in this case the information is grossly
skewed and claiming to represent something that it doesn't. People look at
things like this and form opinions and beliefs on them.

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danielcer
In the general list, Erlang is ranked at position 70 (Usage: 0.2%), while Ruby
is at position 4 (12.7%). So, I'm not sure which list you were looking at
where Erlang was ranked higher than Ruby.

Also, entries like "HTML" & "Javascript" are ranked low since they tend to be
deleted as being non-informative.

All the criticisms that relate to self-report bias in the wiki and the
completeness of entries are reasonable concerns. I'll try to change the text
that introduces the rankings to address this.

