Python compared to other language

[Alex Martelli]

walterbyrd <walterbyrd at iname.com> wrote:

> On May 18, 10:24 pm, a... at mac.com (Alex Martelli) wrote:
> 
> >
> > I think that Ruby, which roughly speaking sits somewhere between Python
> > and Perl, is closer to Python than Perl is.
> 
> I don't know much about Ruby, but it does not seem to be commonly used
> for anything other than web-development. It may be that Ruby could be
> used for other purposes, but I don't seem to see it happen much.
> 
> I know that PHP can used at the command line, and could be used for
> the same sort of sys-admin tasks for which, Perl and Python are often
> used, but I don't seem to see that happening either.
> 
> I'm not sure if Ruby, or PHP, are as general purpose as Perl or Python.

PHP was definitely born _for_ webpages; Ruby wasn't, just like Perl or
Python weren't, it just became very popular for webpages when Rails
appeared.

so i tried search queries for [ intitle:X intitle:Y ] where X is each of
various languages and Y one of two words connected with non-web
traditional application programming, and these are the number of hits I
saw:

Y==scientific:
perl     334
python   703
ruby     452
php      423
java    2370
c++     3340
fortran 3200

Y==payroll:
perl      81
python      1
ruby        8
php     176  
java    382
c++     101
fortran     1

>From these numbers it would seem that Ruby (and PHP) aren't really more
web-specific than Perl (and Python).

In general, these days, when you're interested in how popular each of a
certain set of technologies / subjects is, search engines can come in
handy (with due precautions, of course: for example, "php" appears in SO
many web pages (2.5 billion, vs e.g. 282 million for java) that you need
to restrict it cleverly (e.g., I used the intitle: attribute -- that
gives 20.1 million for php vs 21.4 million for Java, and biases numbers
towards pages that in some sense are "about" that technology rather than
just happening to mention it as an aside, a part of an URL, etc:-).  "c"
is very hard to search for because many occurrences of that single
letter have nothing to do with the language (here you may try quoted
sentences such as "c programming": without precautions, "c" has 2.86
billion hits, but "c programming" 1.22 million vs 1.09 million for "java
programming", which again puts things in better perspective).  I say
"technology" because this doesn't apply to just programming languages:
e.g., "COM", a classic Microsoft technology for component
interconnection, is swamped by the homonimous occurrence of ".com" in
URLs, so you need the intitle: trick or something like that.

An interesting alternative would be to use search engines which do
semantic annotation, but I'm not very familiar with those, myself; I'd
be interested in details if anybody does try that.

Anyway, if you're interested in popularity issues, I believe these
techniques, for all their defects, will work better than asking a few
people or trying to generalize from unsystematic observations.


Alex