On Sat, May 13, 2006 at 01:50:04PM -0500, brian d foy wrote: > In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Nathan > Torkington <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > On 13/05/2006, at 2:17 AM, Peter Scott wrote: > > > I don't know how long it's been up, but I just noticed Google > > > Trends. See > > > http://www.google.com/trends?q=perl > > > For a bad time, compare Perl to its peers: <http://www.google.com/ > > trends?q=perl+programming%2Cpython+programming%2Cruby > > +programming&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all> > > I'm not so sure these trends are anything to care about. They're > relative to the total volume of Google searches, so even though the > trend is realatively downward, I expect that the total Google search > volume is trending up, and I would also expect that since hardly anyone > in the world is a computer porgrammer, the relative percentages of > computer-ish terms trend downwards if their absolute numbers stayed the > same. Not only that, there's no scale. If we're talking fractions of a > percent, that's a lot different than seeing much larger jumps. Without > more information about overall trends, these numbers don't mean much > because there is no context. > > Still, Ruby seems to be doing really well. :) > > Why worry about other languages though? It's not like Rolls Royce is > going to panic because people are buying more Yugos. :)
I agree. I'd only add that terms like "perl" and "perl programming" would tend to be searched for by people new to the topic and not those experienced in it. Which fits with Ruby seeming to do well here. Tim.
