So, how popular is Haskell compared to other languages? Here are some Google search results that suggest how many web pages are devoted to particular langauges. (Google tells you how many pages match your query.) A better survey of language popularity would include newsgroup and mailing list traffic, but no time, no time.
In this modest survey, Haskell is a little more popular than O'Caml, a little less popular than Eiffel (an OOPL) 5 to 6 times less popular than Smalltalk; 8 to 10 times less popular than Python, which is itself at least 2 and a half or 3 times less popular than Perl. On second thought, Eiffel and Smalltalk might be considerably more popular than suggested by page counts because the other languages surveyed have 100% open-source documentation. eg, in the GHC results I saw lots of duplicates of essentially the same document. This is characteristic of open-source-code-licensed content. In contrast, Eiffel and Smalltalk have commercial vendors, whose documentation is (I would think) underrepresented in this modest survey because of having licenses that restrict copying. perl 9,600,000 perl language OR program OR variable OR object 1,490,000. python -monty -snake -venom 809,000 python program OR language OR variable OR object 630,000 smalltalk 361,000 (say 10% false hits. 325,000 real.) lisp cmucl OR "common lisp" OR heap OR cdr OR cons OR lambda OR closure OR scheme 188,000 eiffel object OR program OR variable OR string -tower 74,700 (I say there's a few false hits there. 71,000 real hits.) ghc haskell OR compiler 63,100 ghc haskell OR compiler OR functional OR fp 66,800 haskell fp OR "programming" OR monad OR monadic OR functional OR lambda 63,600 haskell "programming" OR monad OR monadic OR functional OR lambda 55,500 (I say 63,000 is the most accurate) caml 88,700 (I can see some false hits) "objective caml" OR ocaml OR o'caml 41,700. (42,000) note that there is at least one open-source Linux package, unison, a file sync utility, written in O'Caml. no Linux packages written in Haskell except for Haskell compilers. other info useful for measuring language popularity. <LI><a href="http://www.dwheeler.com/sloc/redhat71-v1/summary";>sloc in various RedHat 7.2 packages</a> <LI><a href="http://upgrade-cepis.org/issues/2001/6/up2-6Gonzalez.pdf";>lines of code in Debian</a> <LI><a href="http://people.debian.org/~jgb/debian-counting/";>Counting Debian //</a> <LI><a href="http://www.eros-os.org/pipermail/e-lang/2001-February/004594.html";> [E-Lang] popularity of programming languages among open source hackers // weak survey, of Sourceforge projects. see also Oct 2001 e-lang.</a> -- Richard Uhtenwoldt _______________________________________________ Haskell mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
