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Wassercrats - You make an interesting point. The increase in Google-indexed pages that have the words "python programming" between 2000 and 2004 relative to the increase in Perl or Java is a trend worth investigating. And, it sounds like you're interested in the topic, so I'd like to offer a few suggestions as to how to go about investigating this.
  1. Expand the list of languages you are looking at. As the investigation will most likely use programs for some of the data gathering, using the list Abigail-II provides shouldn't be too hard.
  2. Compare Google to other search engines. I'm sure that Yahoo, Lycos, and Netscape may have different numbers, so it may be good to do some sort of weighted average between search engines.
  3. I'd be interested in seeing if there was some sort of monthly cyclicaly variation between the various languages and the pages referencing them. For example, the variance between Perl and Java stays relatively constant at 1:3, but that's for January. Maybe it's 1:2 in Aprils of every year?
  4. You'll need to expand how you do the date calculation. There's a few issues I see here:
    • "january 2000" is a very restrictive search, and it only deals with pages that have that phrase in them. If I created a page now with those words, then it would be in the wrong place.
    • Do you use the creation date of the page or the last-modified date of the page? Where would you get this information?
  5. How many of those pages are overlaps? For example, if your OP was indexed, it would show up in every single one of your searches, because you describing the searches.
  6. Remember - you're investigating the amount of times people write about a given language. When writing up your investigation, I would definitely make that very clear.

Populariy of a language is a useful measure of a number of things:

  • How likely you are to get a job working in that language
  • How likely is the language supported by the Internet community
  • How likely is there prior art to work from
  • How likely is there innovation in the language

In essence, you are researching the living-ness of the language. I suspect that if you look at languages like Ada, Forth, and CL/I, you'll find their living-ness to be at a very low ebb. New languages, like Ruby, Python, PHP, and Ponie are going to be on the rise in terms of living-ness.

This is very different from the useful-ness of the language. Brainf**k isn't a very useful language, but it was certainly talked about for a while. :-)

------
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Then there are Damian modules.... *sigh* ... that's not about being less-lazy -- that's about being on some really good drugs -- you know, there is no spoon. - flyingmoose

I shouldn't have to say this, but any code, unless otherwise stated, is untested


In reply to Re: Fearing the demise of Perl by dragonchild
in thread Fearing the demise of Perl by Wassercrats

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