What's better about Ruby than Python?

[John J. Lee]

"Andrew Dalke" <adalke at mindspring.com> writes:

> William Trenker:
> > c++ group:comp.lang.python from 1 Jan 2003 to today.  2,630
> >
> > (for what it's worth)
> 
> Relevant for the OP's thoughts.
> 
> I also tried C#, but then wondered if google would have problems
> with non-text characters, and if not, if the search for C++ would
> be biased by
> 
>   int c = 0;
>    ...
>   c++;
[...]

Alex Martelli a while ago posted his way of doing language searches on
Google -- searching for phrases like "x programmer", "x program", "x
code" etc. (including quotes): substitute the name of your favorite
language for x.  Cuts out spurious stuff like 'c++;' (though in that
particular case I expect the systematic error introduced would be
small).  There are interesting differences between the various terms:
the more 'commercial' languages tend to turn up more hits for "x
programmer" than the less-commercial ones, for example.  As a whole, a
bunch of such searches tells you more than any individual one would.
Would be fun to write a Google API script, keep records, and put up a
page to plot graphs of some simple metrics...  No doubt somebody has
done it already.

Somewhere, I came across somebody who had graphed nr. of Amazon books
over the years, by programming language, with a neat web interface
(maybe that was pointed to by Alex's post, can't remember).  IIRC, it
breaks when you select Java -- too many books!  The statistics were
good enough to make it quite interesting, though of course the number
of years availble was quite small.


John