Python's popularity statistics

[Peter Hansen]

"Aaron K. Johnson" wrote:
> 
> In message <mailman.1039658234.21778.python-list at python.org>, Chad Netzer wrote:
> > On Wednesday 11 December 2002 17:24, Mike Dean wrote:
> > > On Wed, 11 Dec 2002 14:49:11 -0600 Aaron K. Johnson
> > <akjmicro at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > > python 9647
> > > > clipper 8960
> > >
> > > Now this is what I find real interesting.  Clipper, right below
> > > Python? I thought Clipper was quite dying, in this client-server
> > > world...  does it still have that big a following?
> >
> > The most important step in any statistical analysis (except perhaps
> > for gross accuracy of the numbers themselves), is interpretation.
> > Drawing any subjective conclusions from these numbers, such as
> > "popularity of language", etc. is essentially meaningless.  Others
> > have already pointed out that "popularity of language" and
> > "activity of newsgroup" could be inversely correlated, as far as we
> > know.  Furthermore, we have no knowledge of how on-topic any
> > specific newsgroup is (not from the raw numbers anyway).
> 
> Do you really think beta might be more popular than Java?
> I still contend that in some cloudy way these number directly represent usage.

You mean in some cloudy-but-*real* way, right?  ;-)

I appreciate the effort in posting these numbers.  You'd probably
be better off letting people draw their own conclusions though: 
several of your posts contradict each other, as near as I can 
tell.  Either Python and Clipper are both very popular and 
well-engineered, or the meaning of the statistics is very open
to wide interpretation.

-Peter