Re: Programming language popularity

[anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl)]

Martin <martin.dowie@btopenworld.com> writes:
>On Apr 3, 10:46=A0am, "Martin Krischik" <krisc...@users.sourceforge.net>
>wrote:
>> Am 02.04.2010, 19:36 Uhr, schrieb Anton Ertl =A0
>> <an...@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>:
>>
>> > About once per year I post some data on programming language
>> > popularity, based on the number of postings in the comp.lang.* groups.
>> > I just took another sample, and below you can find the results, as
>> > well as some older results. =A0For more results and the data, on which
>> > they are based, see
>> > <http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/comp.lang-statistics/>.
...
>Perhaps someone could write a 'random question' generator (in Ada of
>course!) and have it send post to c.l.a. once an hour or so...it could
>gradually increase the frequency of posts over the months, so giving
>the impression that Ada is getting more popular over time.

That is addressed in the web page linked-to above:

|Please don't use this page as an excuse to post noise to the groups
|for your favourite programming language. That would damage the group,
|and therefore eventually reduce the number of postings in the group.

Of course, for, e.g., comp.lang.dylan there is not much left to
damage, but c.l.ada and c.l.forth are in a much better position.  And
even comp.lang.beta and comp.lang.asm370 seem to have a minor revival.

Of course you could plan to spam so much that you make up for or even
exceed the loss, but I doubt that looking good at these statistics is
so valuable that someone would want to destroy a working community
communication medium.  Also, you might not even have success with such
a plan; my news server employs Cleanfeed to filter out spam, and is
quite effective at that, so your spam might not even show up in my
statistics (ok, maybe your spam generator will outwit Cleanfeed (after
all, the spam generator is written in Ada and Cleanfeed in Perl:-)).

- anton
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