On Fri, Jan 25, 2008 at 05:12:14AM -0600, brian d foy wrote:
> In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Tim Bunce
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > On Thu, Jan 24, 2008 at 10:00:26PM -0600, Andy Lester wrote:
>
> > http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm
> >
> > It's a pity they don't offer more information about their methodology.
>
> They do:
>
> http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm
Ah, I think you meant
http://www.tiobe.com/index.htm?tiobe_index/tpci_definition.htm
> It's simple search result counting for "foo programming", with no
> attempt to deal with duplicates.
Even the processing of the data seems flawed:
I get 923,000 hits from google for +"python programming" and 3,030,000
for +"perl programming". (The hits for Jython, IronPython, and pypy
programming are tiny.)
Using google blog search I get 139,887 for +"python programming" and
491,267 for +"perl programming". (The hits for Jython, IronPython, and pypy
programming are tiny.)
So roughly 3-to-1 in perl's favor from those two sources. It's hard to
imagine that "MSN, Yahoo!, and YouTube" would yield very different ratios.
3:1 for perl, yet python ranks higher than perl. Certainly seems odd.
> You'll notice they have a big disclaimer about their change in April
> 2004 when Google adjusted their search rankings. Since they are just
> using the number of search results without looking at content, it's
> just wanking with numbers.
Wanking with numbers can be useful at times, so long as everyone
understands the limits of what the numbers represent and the data
and conclusions are accurate within those limits.
That doesn't seem to be the case here.
Tim.
