On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 7:09 PM, Charles Oliver Nutter < [email protected]> wrote:
> > John D. Mitchell wrote: > >> 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) > >> . > > > > Indeed! Just using raw text search metrics is wildly bad. One nasty > > effect is the low end numbers often get lost from the crawling and > > indexing. > > And here's a more insidious problem with search engine results: they > don't filter out false positives. So for a reasonably common word like > "groovy" you get inflated results. Even "groovy programming" gets hits > from programmers that think programming is groovy. "jruby" on the other > hand has pretty much only one meaning, as does "scala", "clojure", and > Actually, Scala has a host of different meanings. If you google for scala, scala-lang.org is 5th on the page (it used to not even be on the first page)! It's even got several different meanings within computing. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
