John Wilson 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.

I'll echo Tom's statement and add a couple of my own.

JRuby's mailing lists have never been extremely busy, partly because 
Ruby and Rails and other Ruby libs/frameworks have their own lists (and 
really, their own communities), but also because we use IRC pretty 
heavily for many discussions. And IRC has been a *huge* boon to the 
project; truly interactive support of users, real-time design 
discussions...without IRC we would certainly not be where we are today.

Striking a balance between the two is tricky, and I lament the lack of 
ML traffic; but the benefits of IRC can't be ignored.

I'll also agree that using ML traffic can be misleading. Ruby probably 
had more traffic on the main list a couple years ago, before many 
libraries and frameworks moved off to their own lists and users started 
native-language lists. So if you considered mailing list traffic (which 
can still be misleading), you'd need to consider traffic across many, 
many lists. Groovy and Scala differ in this way because they largely 
have only a couple separate major lists, where Ruby has mailing lists 
for basically all the main projects.

There's also another reason ML traffic can be misleading: if a library 
or app works without modification, most people don't ever subscribe. We 
get people using JRuby happily for months without us ever knowing about 
it. They learn Ruby and Rails (maybe joining those lists or maybe not), 
then switch to JRuby without many bumps. So ML traffic becomes a victim 
of our focus on Ruby compatibility...if we succeed, nobody should *need* 
to join the JRuby ML.

- Charlie

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