On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 3:41 PM, Dr. David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > On 02/16/11 03:16 PM, William Stein wrote: >> >> On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 4:55 AM, Dr. David Kirkby >> <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: >>> >>> On 02/16/11 03:31 AM, Eviatar wrote: >>>> >>>> Hello, >>>> >>>> I have been monitoring TIOBE, a programming language popularity index. >>>> Python has been experiencing extremely fast growth in the last few >>>> months, rising to fourth place from seventh in a year, just behind >>>> Java, C, and C++. It has also experienced the most increase in >>>> popularity of any language in 2010. TIOBE uses search engines for >>>> data, by the way, so the results are indicative of popularity in >>>> numbers of searches, not necessarily usage. >>>> >>>> I think this is an extraordinary success for Python, and can only be >>>> good for Sage. >>>> >>> >>> >>> I'm somewhat suspicious of that data. For example, Lisp is #14, MATLAB >>> #29 >>> and LabVIEW #47. >>> >>> Do a job search on monstir.com or similar and see how many jobs want Lisp >>> programmers compared to MATLAB and Labview. >> >> They define what they are actually measuring here: >> >> http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/tpci_definition.htm >> >> They claim all they are doing is a weighted count of the number of >> hits for +"<language> programming" on >> Google/YouTube/Blogger/Wikipedia/etc. >> >> I just tried a few searches of the form +"<language> programming" on >> just Google, and indeed Python is way ahead of many other languages, >> but java/C/C++/.NET are way ahead of Python. Lisp returns less than >> 10% the number of results as Python. > > .NET is one that surprised me. Visual Basic .NET comes in at #22 on the > TIOBE list. That's the first mention of .NET. Again, well behind Lisp. > > There are over 1000 jobs on monstir.com mentioning .NET, compared to 2 with > Lisp. > > So can anyone seriously believe that TIOBE's cliam: > > "can be used to check whether your programming skills are > still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what > programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new > software system." > > According to TIOBE's stats I'd be better learning Lisp than .NET, yet there > are more than 500 times as many jobs on Monstir mentioning .NET compared to > Lisp.
You seem to not realize that C# is the primary .NET language. It is *number 6* in the TIOBE ranking is C#. > Note Mathematica is nowhere to be found. I have seen the odd jobs on Monstir > where Mathematica skills were desirable or needed, but they have been very > few. There are none at the minute. This is why I have some difficulty in > believing the claims from Wolfram Research about the number of users in > industry. The web site gives the impression Mathematica is used a lot in > industry, but that does not seem to be backed up by the number of job > adverts mentioning the tool. It is indeed surprising that Mathematica is not on the list, since Maple and Matlab both are, and they are clear that they do track Mathematica. Thus it must rank below 100. Doing a search on google for +"mathematica programming" gives a mere 31,000 results (compared to almost a million for Python, about 40,000 for Maple, and about 230,000 for Matlab). Just for fun, here's what the TIOBE-using-only-google results are for our niche world of math software: language hits for +"language programming" Octave 8320 Sage 3180 GAP 2780 Singular 2090 Axiom 1150 Scilab 863 Maxima 818 Magma 566 Pari 334 Kash 10 Macaulay2 3 Fricas 3 OpenAxiom 0 NOTE: Looking at results, GAP has way more false positives than Sage, since "gap" is a common word that can occur in the context of programming, e.g. "Bridging the Gap: Programming Sensor Networks with Applications" is on the first page. William -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
