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?
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