Re: LUI: Language Usage Indicators page

++ for an interesting compilation, nicely executed.

And, IMO, similarly, ++s for those respondents who regard some of the underlying metrics as of less-than-probative or rigorous value. (My own, highly prejudiced view is that use of metrics is highly over-valued in ( some | many | most ) current uses.

For example by analogy, were you comparing the incidence of disease in human populations, you'd want to control for gender, age, ethnicity, geographic location, and a host of other factors, over a specific time span. Counting the number of projects or posts on SourceForge doesn't, per se, deal with the time span component. And to undermine my next observation, counting lines of "finished" code fails because some languages are more verbose than others.

Perhaps however, if reliable and current data is available, extending your results with some additional metrics such as "lines of debugged code/day" (or, far more fancifully, instances of use of finished -- eg. well debugged -- programs) would enhance the value.

But again, none of the above is intended to "rain on your parade." IMO, it's a fine piece of work and potentially of significant value.

Comment on Re: LUI: Language Usage Indicators page

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Re^2: LUI: Language Usage Indicators page by arbingersys (Pilgrim) on Mar 05, 2008 at 20:50 UTC
Thanks for the comments. I do realize that some of these metrics are of the "for what it's worth" type. That's why I chose to be completely transparent with how they were obtained. And part of my posting on Perlmonks was to figure out how to improve them. Some of the problem is how to get at certain metrics. Some you just obviously can't get (e.g. how many companies in America use Perl for internal web development?) in any reliable way, and definitely not with my limited resources. The metrics I currently have are web scrapings, which are relatively easy to obtain, but have their problems, like reliability, granularity, etc. Some metrics may be obtainable, but would require much greater effort. For instance, I thought it would be interesting to see for various languages how sizable, active, etc their module repositories were. But at this point I haven't even started to delve into figuring out how to go about getting this data. I do like your suggestions, and I'll take them under consideration. As for "instances of use of finished -- eg. well debugged -- programs", I think a SourceForge top N (I was thinking 100, but perhaps more) metric is sort of along these lines. A blog among millions.	[reply]

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Re^2: LUI: Language Usage Indicators page
by arbingersys (Pilgrim) on Mar 05, 2008 at 20:50 UTC

Thanks for the comments. I do realize that some of these metrics are of the "for what it's worth" type. That's why I chose to be completely transparent with how they were obtained. And part of my posting on Perlmonks was to figure out how to improve them.

Some of the problem is how to get at certain metrics. Some you just obviously can't get (e.g. how many companies in America use Perl for internal web development?) in any reliable way, and definitely not with my limited resources. The metrics I currently have are web scrapings, which are relatively easy to obtain, but have their problems, like reliability, granularity, etc.

Some metrics may be obtainable, but would require much greater effort. For instance, I thought it would be interesting to see for various languages how sizable, active, etc their module repositories were. But at this point I haven't even started to delve into figuring out how to go about getting this data.

I do like your suggestions, and I'll take them under consideration. As for "instances of use of finished -- eg. well debugged -- programs", I think a SourceForge top N (I was thinking 100, but perhaps more) metric is sort of along these lines.

A blog among millions.

[reply]