On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 6:48 AM, John Wilson <[email protected]> wrote: > > > If it was possible to get a metric which was roughly "numbers of user > queries per month" I would imagine that would be quite a good > correlation with popularity. There would, of course, be a problem with > JRuby and Jython because they have a proportion of there users who are > new to the implementation but not new to the language so you would > expect to so a smaller number of messages because the "how to I turn > an int into a float" type of question would have been answered > elsewhere.
Yeah and since many people using JRuby will have Ruby problems they end up asking virtually all general Ruby questions on a general Ruby mailing list than on JRuby's lists. I think in the last 4 years we have had approximately 4 pure-Ruby questions asked on our lists. So even if you are new to both implemention AND language you know there are richer sources of info available (like ruby-talk). I am also amazed at how many people I run into at conferences who are using JRuby in production and: 1. never joined mailing list 2. never joined irc channel 3. never updated our wiki 4. never emailed us And this is from people who are actually attending conferences! I think most people who use software never ever get seen directly by the project offering that software. Jobs seem like a good metric, but the job listing are a gigantic over-stuffed pot of acronyms. I don't really trust postings too much. For us, a job for Ruby on Rails may or may not be us. It may not even be a Ruby on Rails job. Also head-hunters duplicate job postings on sites which over-inflates the number of jobs that actually exist. I think it is a noisy source. Book sales and probably training attendance (consultants offering training perhaps) is not a bad thing to look at. If people are regularly making money training people on software then the money is likely coming from a company. Companies generally only pay money for training on things they want to start using. Book sales are mostly the same, but many programmers buy books for themselves. Still, the company needs the inspiration to use new software from somewhere. So book sales may be better indication of what is to come and training tells you what is here now. Though training also seems to be a cultural thing so it probably varies a lot (More people probably need to take PeopleSoft training than Rails training for example). Conferences seem to depend on the culture of the language too. Ruby has many cheap local conferences so I think many individuals will pay to go whether they get their company to pay or not. JavaOne on the other hand...Attendance has to almost be entirely be funded from companies. The price is much higher. heh, this is a tough subject :) babble..babble...Thanks Robert...hopefully this thread help illuminate this better for us all... -Tom -- Blog: http://www.bloglines.com/blog/ThomasEEnebo Email: [email protected] , [email protected] --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "JVM Languages" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/jvm-languages?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
