Robert Fischer wrote: > Is there any kind of reasonable language adoption metric out there? I'm not > sure how one might > measure that, but it's hard to tell which languages have more mindshare -- > get different people with > different focuses together, and they seem to have wildly different guesses.
Tim O'Reilly has used book sales numbers as a measure a couple times, and it's probably not a bad measure to use. People that buy a book on a language or libraries related to the language are making a real, measurable investment in it. Related to this is probably just the number of books published on a subject, since it means authors at least believe there will be a market. In some of my presentations I've used conference attendance as a measure. For example, there were more Ruby conferences in 2008 than Menudo has albums. Most of the conferences were smaller affairs (50-200 people) but RailsConf has gone from 500 people to 1500 people to 2500 people. And most of these conferences cost money, so again, there's a real measurable investment going on. I'd like to hear about other metrics too. There's obviously no scientific way to measure it, so these are all estimate based on some other concrete fact. But we can probably get pretty close. I think that's some of the idea behind TIOBE...they're trying to aggregate a number of metrics to form a rough picture. It's probably not super accurate, but it does illustrate some interesting trends. - Charlie --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "JVM Languages" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/jvm-languages?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
