On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 5:19 AM, Charles Oliver Nutter <[email protected]> wrote: > > John D. Mitchell wrote: >> One metric that is relatively telling in the broader view is the >> number of job listings mentioning a given language. >> >> However, such a direct, first-order measure misses the importance of >> the influence of languages on other languages, tools, etc. > > I think TIOBE uses job metrics as one of their indicators. It seems like > a reasonably good indicator that a language "has been" adopted to some > level, but probably not much of an indicator of languages on their way > to being adopted. For example, we all know Lisp is going to take over > the programming language world any day now, and it's only in 23rd place > on TIOBE. Meanwhile, COBOL, which is dying a slow death, is in 17th > place. So I'd say job numbers is a lagging indicator at best...
TIOBE say they use search engine metrics using the search term "<language> programming" with some language specific post processing (see http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/tpci_definition.htm). Once the percentage score for a language falls below 5% I don't think the numbers are significant. Their longer term trends look to be more valuable and show just how jittery the metric is (I'm sure the actual usage of established language does not exhibit this degree of jitter. What we are seeing is an artefact of the metric. And what happened in 2004! http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html). "Tim O'Reilly"'s (actually, the latest one I can find is from Mike Hendrickson http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/03/state-of-the-computer-book-mar-23.html) analysis of the IT book market is based on hard data but, of course, is not a direct measure of the usage of languages. There are obvious problems with correlating book purchase with language use (Somebody who has been writing Fortran for 20 years is probably not going to be buying a book on Fortran this quarter - Very few of the people buying Haskel books this quarter will be using the language for serious work). Job adds are to be treated with some suspicion. Recruiters just love keywords, I'm not sure there's a very high correlation between the language skills in the ad and the language actually used:) I think that any method which uses internet searches is going to be pretty unreliable. You are measuring what people are talking about not what they are using. For example imagine using that method to measure mobile phone usage - I think you'd come to the conclusion that 75% of the population use the iPhone. For languages which are of direct interest to this list I think the best metric is mailing list usage (markmail.org is very good for this) John Wilson --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
