Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by davidw 5424 days ago
http://www.langpop.com is better because

1) I use more metrics and

2) I don't go around making statements about how, from one month to the next, someone displaced someone else, or climbed into a certain ranking, or things like that.

3) I let people reweight the chart based on the metrics they like.

I think the numbers LangPop comes up with are pretty good, but by their very nature are a bit fuzzy.
1 comments
profquail 5424 days ago
F# isn't listed on any of your charts. I think it's probably popular enough to show up in all of your data sources at this point.

Also, maybe add GitHub and StackOverflow as data sources?

link
davidw 5424 days ago
F# should probably go there, yeah.

GitHub and StackOverflow started out really biased in terms of their communities - GitHub with Ruby, and StackOverflow with Microsoft languages. Do you think they've sufficiently lost that bias?

link
profquail 5423 days ago
On another note, you know what else could be a great source(s) for data? Google Scholar, CiteSeerX and arXiv. It'd be really interesting to compare the language usage between "industry" and academia.
link
profquail 5423 days ago
I think StackOverflow has; GitHub still seems a bit biased towards scripting languages like Ruby or Javascript though. In any case, since you show the graphs from the various sources, I don't think it matters if one source is more biased than another. If, for example, you used CodePlex as a data source, you'll see a huge bias towards C# -- but visitors to your site could simply draw their own conclusions from the charts.
link
gaius 5423 days ago
Where can I see the data for GitHub?

I'm not sure I even trust that... I do lots of bindings from OCaml to C, and whereas I consider them to be OCaml projects, GitHub sees they're more C by LOC and counts them as C.

link
jshen 5424 days ago
If nearly all ruby programmers put their code on github, and you don't count it but you do count google code, then isn't that a bias i the sample? Wouldn't it make more sense to include all the major code hosting sites, including github?
link
davidw 5423 days ago
Google's Code Search just searches for code on the internet.
link
jshen 5423 days ago
ah, sorry. I thought you were looking at google code repos.
link
davidw 5423 days ago
This is, by the way, an honest question. I think at a certain point they'll be mainstream enough to say yes, but it's tough to say when.
link