As a follow-up, we've been doing some heavy quantitative analysis of extrinsic (social) and intrinsic factors in language adoption. These charts should give you a taste:
Fig 1: Factors in Picking a Language for A Recent Project
Fig 2: Language Popularity on SourceForge.
The first figure is cool in that it shows that social factors are more important than intrinsic features when picking a language. Language designers are community builders.
The second figure starts questioning the social structure. Popularity, city populations, etc. often follow power laws, and therefore growth gets modeled by some intuitive generative processes. However, SourceForge for ~200,000 projects followed an exponential curve. What type of processes can make more sense there?
Anyways, hope the camera ready looks good and the quantitatve analysis sparks thought :)
2 comments:
I'm confused by Figure 2 -- what is the criterion for whether a language should be included in the graph? i.e., is there a reason you excluded Java, Perl, C#, C, C++, etc.?
Oh, that's actually showing all of the 100 languages I saw on SourceForge. There may be more, but they weren't recording it, and the top 30 cover 98% of the projects anyways. The figure couldn't show all of the labels so it sampled at intervals.
To given an idea:
#1: Java
#20: ActionScript
#50: Free Pascal (#43: Haskell!)
#100: Algol 68
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