On Wed, 14 Sep 2011 11:20:03 -0400, Jeff Nowakowski <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 09/14/2011 07:23 AM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
As interpreted by Mr. Nowakowski, it's misleading to say that D is good
because some objective language popularity measurement shows D is
gaining ground.
Tiobe is not objective. There is a "manually determined confidence
factor", and also some arbitrary numbers like "The first 100 pages per
search engine are checked for possible false positives and this is used
to define the confidence factor."
This explains why D is ranked so much higher than Scala, despite other
statistics that show the reverse. A lot of the early hits about D and
programming may actually be about D, but that doesn't mean all the rest
will be. Because D is so common, you're going to start getting junk
results the further out you go.
It's objective in that the results/methodology are not picked to favor D.
Whether it's *accurate* or not is certainly up for debate.
But what makes your statistics more "valid" than Tiobe's? As Walter said,
there are multiple ways to measure popularity, and every one is guaranteed
to dissatisfy some people.
I say, that's just normal marketing. Even if it's not a
true accurate measurement, it is a report somebody published, and why
not take advantage of it?
Because you have some integrity?
I fail to see why quoting a published article that says some measured
statistics show that D is gaining popularity lacks integrity. People *do*
take Tiobe seriously, for whatever reason. Why should we not use that in
our favor?
For instance, let's say someone starts to use D at a university somewhere,
maybe even at a university that isn't a very highly ranked technical
university. Does it lack integrity to say "hey look, D is being used in
universities!"? I mean, marketing is promotion, it's not criticism.
I don't know, I think this discussion isn't going anywhere. Signing off.
-Steve
