More usenet usage statistics, by programming language

[Aaron K. Johnson]

In message <%djY9.51$Xw5.38 at nwrddc04.gnilink.net>, Carl Banks wrote:
> Aaron K. Johnson wrote:
> > In message <v339gg9p1rlb3e at news.supernews.com>, "John Roth" wrote:
> >> 
> >> I don't understand. Number of unique posters in the last 200 posts to a
> >> newsgroup I understand,
> >> and 647 to the (one) Python newsgroup I understand, but I don't
> >> understand how you get
> >> 647 different posters out of the last 200 posts.
> >> 
> >> Oh, and Clipper is an old data base language, somewhere in the dbase
> >> family.
> > 
> > oops, sorry....I meant 2000!
> 
> 
> Ok, then how do you account for 3715 different posters for Java:

I should have explained....each comp.lang.x.subgroup hierarchy gets totalled
together as one group. So comp.lang.java.moderated, comp.lang.java.whatever get
added together.....which makes me realize, I should make sure there are
no-cross posts....back to the drawing board.
 
> > survey begins here:
> > 
> > java 3715
> > (c/c++ taken together) 1511
> > basic 1292
> > perl 1240
> > c++ 953
> > pascal 905
> 
> 
> FWIW, N different posters in the last M posts is an irrelevant
> statistic for me.  N different posters in the X period of time might
> mean something--it certainly correlates somewhat to acutal
> popularity--but there are too many factors involved to get anything
> better than a vague estimate from it.

I'm just going for 'less and less vague each time'. Any more suggestions?
It'll take some tinkering with my code, but I might be able to get that date
based evaluation soon, I'll let you know.