Recently while reviewing other folks methodology for "comparing" programming languages, I resolved that the common practice of searching for the number of 'hits' in a web search engine was a pretty poor (yet seemingly standard) measurement.

In response, I resolved to a different variant of this measurement standard: Instead of searching for the language name, search for "HelloWorld.foo" where "foo" represents the common 'extension' for that particular language.

This alternate methodology is more desirable because it does not compare the 'total number of hits' instead, it allows one to evaluate the *content* of the hits, and thereby assess some of the fundamental characteristics of the language in comparison to others. For example, one can compare how many 'hits' consist of:

- various complaints that HelloWorld.foo will not run 
- tutorials for new learners
- a part of online documentation (if it exists)
- discussion about programming in general
- a part of 'social banter' (public mindshare)

[download]

The HelloWorld metric appears to have quite a bit of promise for getting 'big picture' comparisons. A cursory initial review of the "HelloWorld.pl" metric seems to indicate that most of the "complaints" type posts are not even related to perl, but to CGI and web programming.

Comments and critique welcome.

In reply to Programming Language Comparison Level 0: the HelloWorld metric by dimar

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