Python's popularity statistics

[Chad Netzer]

On Wednesday 11 December 2002 19:40, Peter Hansen wrote:

> 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:

Consider that one of the biggest threads this past month, in this 
newsgroup, was about Lisp, and that this thread to which am 
responding is growing by leaps and bounds.  They are both, at best, 
meta-python threads, not really discussion of day-to-day use of 
Python.   So, just from that alone, I conclude that the numbers 
Aaron posts, without other data, are not good indicators of things 
such as "popularity", "interest", and other non-concrete measures.  
As has been said many times, it is easy to "lie with statistics" 
:), because interpreting statistical data is HARD.

If trend data were computed and published (and I believe such 
things are already done), that would be useful AND interpretable 
(in a limited way).  The fact that Aaron was able to quickly gather 
the statistics using Python, is a nice message.  But it should be 
left at that, IMO.

-- 
Bay Area Python Interest Group - http://www.baypiggies.net/

Chad Netzer
cnetzer at mail.arc.nasa.gov