| This seems wrong to me, and fairly obviously wrong. If you take a group X, a certain percentage Y hang out in newsgroups and blog. He himself was part of that Y for Forth. Why would the percentage Y be significantly different for any given language? The number of bloggers/newsgroup users is like a survey, it's not complete, but it's a very good indicator of how popular a language is. The popularity of a language increases its ease of use by a considerable factor (libraries, help, documentation, etc.). Hence Forth being a language no-one uses today, which actually contradicts his point, rather than illustrating it as he seems to think. Elizabeth Rather was right, there were people doing interesting things with Forth, but there weren't many. And for most of us, that's an important thing to consider when using any tool. That there is a huge number of bloggers looking down their nose at Perl & C++ simply shows there's something wrong with both those languages. It doesn't mean that they're not still useful though, nor does it mean something else solved the problem until a lot of 'I used Go/Rust/Haskell/Whatever to make non-trivial program' posts appear. |
There are lots of reasons I can imagine: people trying out newer languages have more reason to talk publicly about what they're doing, since they usually have a vested interest in the growth of that language. Organizations with tight rules on secrecy are often risk-averse in general and less likely to try out new languages. So new languages wind up with users that are more open, and they appear even more active. (I don't know if this is true -- it's just a guess. But your assertion that the percentages would likely be uniform across languages feels unlikely to me.)
I'm not sure the argument is that the percentage who hang out in newsgroups and blog is different, anyway, but rather that looking at newsgroup activity and blogs specifically selects out many of the actual experts. This has absolutely been my experience, and one of the most damaging assumptions I see is that surveying blogs and twitter feeds is enough to get a complete understanding of how people use a piece of software and what they think of it.