Python use growing or shrinking

Erik Max Francis max at
Thu Jan 23 08:18:10 CET 2003

Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters wrote:

> OK... my totally scientific, irrefutable proof of the relative... umm,
> usage, or usefulness, or popularity, or buzz, or hype, or jobs, or
> LOC,
> or something... of different programming languages: ...

See, but that's the whole point.  You define a metric, and say how you
got the metric.  None of us really know what the metric means in terms
of the _real_ popularity, usefulness, etc. (throw in any other words you
choose to here), but we know how you arrived at your numbers and can
move on from there.

Presumably this took you a few minutes at the most (the only thing I
think would be missing for a coup de grace would be normalizing the
figures so they're easier to read and interpret) is arguably far more
valuable than the original page we were talking about, which 1. uses an
unspecified means to collect its rating, 2. does not demonstrate how
that rating means anything useful, 3. uses that rating and changes in it
over time to make wild extrapolations ("C# will be the most popular
language in two years"), and 4. makes a dividing line between "good"
languages and "bad" languages based on an arbitrary cutoff of that

 Erik Max Francis / max at /
/  \ Men play the game; women know the score.
\__/ Roger Woddis /
 A personal guide to online multiplayer first person shooters.

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