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UPDATE: (Jul 31, 2010 at 01:11 UTC)
It looks like there may be a bug in how PTAV is now calculating the Root Node Count. As a sanity check, I picked a recent day at random: June 8, 2010. Super Search shows that there were 18 root nodes created that day, but PTAV only shows 9. That's a big discrepancy.

I picked another day at random: June 8, 2003. Both Super Search and PTAV match for that day 7 years ago (23 root nodes).

I conclude that the recent PTAV results are incorrect, and the following discussion is invalid.

Here is my original post:

++ to jcwren for creating Perlmonks Threaded Article Viewer, which is still collecting data nearly 9 years after it was launched.

Well, the 'data' is now 'information'. If we can assume that the data is accurate, it clearly indicates a trend. The 'Root Node Count' (the number of top level nodes) is calculated for every year, from 1999 to 2010. The count peaked in 2001, remained fairly constant for the 5 year period of 2001-2005, then started steadliy declining in 2006.

Would anyone care to speculate on the reason for the decline?

Have some people switched from using Perl to another language?
Are there fewer new Perl users? Are people choosing a newer language?
Do fewer people come to PerlMonks? I imagine there are many more online forums now than there were a decade ago, which means that there are now more choices.
Was there any event (or sequence of events) in late 2005 which triggered the decline?
Has it all been said and done by now? Have people run out of new reasons to start threads (Meditations, Tutorials, CUPF, etc.)?

What say you, monks?

In reply to Re: Perlmonks Threaded Article Viewer (Trend) by toolic
in thread Perlmonks Threaded Article Viewer by jcwren

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