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> It would strongly violate my expectations for Scala to be > more popular than LabVIEW (which is NOT just "the Lego > Mindstorms language") I'm not talkin

by apl 15y ago

> It would strongly violate my expectations for Scala to be > more popular than LabVIEW (which is NOT just "the Lego > Mindstorms language") I'm not talking about LabView; it's literally the Lego Mindstorms language [1] that outranks Erlang, MATLAB, ActionScript, Scheme, Groovy, R, Scala, and so Forth. LabView appears in the "Can't compare that meaningfully" category. So consider your expectations violated. > The "community" they're measuring is not the HN > community, which is not even close to a representative > sample of engineers worldwide. I understand the potential bubble effects at work. I'm not arguing that Scala or Clojure or whatever's hip should come out on top. What I'm contesting is their notion of popularity. The measurements may be reliable (I don't think they are), but they're sure as hell not measuring anything worthwhile. NXT-G may be more "popular" in the sense of being Googled more often, but that's utterly irrelevant for 99% of all cases where you'd be interested in language popularity. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Mindstorms_NXT#NXT-G http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Mindstorms_NXT#NXT-G

wvenable 15y ago
> it's literally the Lego Mindstorms language [1] that outranks Erlang, MATLAB, ActionScript, Scheme, Groovy, R, Scala, and so Forth. I'm not sure why you're so surprised. I can see that it's quite likely that Lego Mindstorms is more popular and has more users than many of those languages. I don't yet have a Mindstorms set, but I've been considering it for a while -- I can't say the same for Clojure, Groovy, Scheme, or R.
vorg 15y ago
Tiobe can easily be gamed. Look at OReilly's book sales to see a truer ranking of language popularity at http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/04/computer-book-market-2011-part4.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/04/computer-book-market-2011-p... The treemap is especially interesting. The square size shows market size, while the background color shows percentage change from previous year. E.g. both Scala and Clojure have green "increasing share" squares, while nearby Groovy and Labview have smaller, red "decreasing share" squares. Because people need to pay OReilly for the book, it's much more difficult to cheat than Tiobe, which only takes some "Project Manager" to spend half their day creating websites, generating cycles of links, producing online verbiage, submitting pages to search engines, blah blah blah

by apl 15y ago

wvenable 15y ago

> it's literally the Lego Mindstorms language [1] that outranks Erlang, MATLAB, ActionScript, Scheme, Groovy, R, Scala, and so Forth. I'm not sure why you're so surprised. I can see that it's quite likely that Lego Mindstorms is more popular and has more users than many of those languages. I don't yet have a Mindstorms set, but I've been considering it for a while -- I can't say the same for Clojure, Groovy, Scheme, or R.

vorg 15y ago

Tiobe can easily be gamed. Look at OReilly's book sales to see a truer ranking of language popularity at http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/04/computer-book-market-2011-part4.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/04/computer-book-market-2011-p... The treemap is especially interesting. The square size shows market size, while the background color shows percentage change from previous year. E.g. both Scala and Clojure have green "increasing share" squares, while nearby Groovy and Labview have smaller, red "decreasing share" squares. Because people need to pay OReilly for the book, it's much more difficult to cheat than Tiobe, which only takes some "Project Manager" to spend half their day creating websites, generating cycles of links, producing online verbiage, submitting pages to search engines, blah blah blah