Lambda the Ultimate

No argument there. However, as the website from which the popularity statistics originated says:

The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, and Yahoo! are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TPC index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written. [emphasis mine]

Why? Mostly because I seem to come across people who program in Ocaml much more often than I come across people who program in Postscript. I know there are some folks who write directly in Postscript, but they seem (to me) to be few and far between.

And yes, this is purely anecdotal evidence. That's why I said "I find it a little hard to believe..." as opposed to "their statistics are wrong...". If you have evidence that counters my impressions of the relative popularity of Ocaml and Postscript I'd be interested to hear it.

%!
/Times-Roman findfont
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setfont
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(Writing PostScript directly can be very much fun.) show
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(My favorite examples are RandomFonts such as:) show
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(http://www.letterror.com/foundry/beowolf/) show 
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(and http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~luc/randomfont.html) show
showpage

Too silly?

--Shae Erisson - ScannedInAvian.com

...you may sooner or later do some postscript. Postscript and O'Caml don't really overlap, as one is most a dedicated print formatting language, and the other is more general purpose. To me it's about as useful as asking why more people do SQL than do Java.

My impression was that most Postscript was auto-generated these days, as opposed to hand-coded. Hence my suprise at Postscript being "more popular" than Ocaml. Although I suppose it depends on how you (or, more importantly, the people doing the survey) define "popularity". As Marc has already pointed out, their methods are a little suspect.

As an aside, I really didn't intend to have this turn into some kind of language pissing match. I don't even use Ocaml [edit: I think I have probably written more hand-coded Postscript than I have Ocaml. Of course, even that only amounts to a couple of dozen lines]. I was just surprised by some of the relative rankings (with PS/Ocaml being the one that most caught my attention).

you may sooner or later do some postscript

Here is a PostScript program for drawing fractals that I wrote many years ago. You can send it directly to the printer. Be careful if you use it for drawing very intricate fractals, since it can use a lot of processing time on the printer! The source code has some examples of other fractals (just uncomment them and have fun). The data for the fractals is compatible with the FractaSketch program.

Although it does get used for some commercial work, OCaml is stil mostly a
dabbler language. Many people use it for small tasks because it's more soothing
to the soul than C++. But I'd argue that OCaml is a language without a true
niche.

Postscript, on the other hand, is at the foundation of a huge industry. Anyone
working on applications that generate pretty output digs into Postscript. And,
believe it or not, there's a good number of (crazy!) people who like to work
directly in Postscript, because it's more precise and more direct than using an
object-based editing program.

Similarly, I'd believe that more people program in Forth than OCaml. Forth has
a fairly poor internet presence, but it gets used in high volume embedded
applications. Odds are you're familiar with something that's been written in
Forth (though you wouldn't know it), but the same can't be said of OCaml.

Open Firmware alone pretty much guarantees that the last point is true.

Wikipedia's article about the Power Law links to a blog post about the Power Law in the blogosphere.

What can I say? It seems to reinforce the Explorers, Pioneers, Townsfolk comparison mentioned here recently.

Maybe you could use this sort of data to support the idea that most people are Townsfolk about everything? A more interesting study might compare whether people fit into the same part of the power law curve in many parts of their life.

For an on-topic study, what about comparing the features present in the languages to see if that can predict power law ranking?

Maybe popularity is a function of the notable people in a community rather than features?
Can you predict where Fortess will end up being ranked?

Can you use these measurements to design the academic equivalent of a manufactured boy band?


What do you think is interesting about the power law distribution?

--Shae Erisson - ScannedInAvian.com

For an on-topic study, what about comparing the features present in the languages to see if that can predict power law ranking?

Actually, I think one of the interesting things we can learn from the power law distribution of languages is that looking at features as a way to predict ranking won't really tell us a whole lot. As Clay Shirky points out in talking about the blogosphere, power law distributions tend to arise as a result of network effects in a system where many individuals are presented with a large range of choices. While features may play a part, they are probably not the dominant force in shaping language popularity. Which perhaps goes a long way towards explaining why "better" languages like Haskell and Oz are not popular, and perhaps helps to answer the question "why do the program in C++?" that was raised in another forum topic here.

Can you predict where Fortess will end up being ranked?

Can you use these measurements to design the academic equivalent of a manufactured boy band?

• For starters, the fact that it exists at all. Which seems to indicate something other than "features" as a popularity driver for languages.
• The way that the power law ties into previous discussions here about languages "just under the radar", and the pressures on "popular" languages to support certain features (Shirky points out similar pressures on "A-list" bloggers to become more like mainstream media outlets).
• The fact that, due to the scale-free nature of a power law distribution, the notion of an "under the radar" language doesn't have any real meaning (where do you draw the line?)
• The possibility of homeostasis in systems subject to the kind of feedback that produces power law distributions, and what that says about the difficulties faced by new languages in getting adopted.
• The possibility that the global nature of the internet will allow niche languages that might previously have died out to thrive and survive, in the same way that Amazon can stock "long tail" books.

I thought the power law distribution aspect was interesting

There is a key fallacy in the "long tail of distribution" reasoning that the long tail is numerically superior in aggregate, so it is where the opportunities lie.

This is sort of true, but to make it work for you (in business or in research), you have to be able to cover the WHOLE tail at once, or pick just the right mote in the tail that is headed for greatness.

The long tail itself tells you nothing other than that you have a diverse population. Stephen Jay Gould wrote a whole book about this: Full House.

just what does constitute "under the radar" on that curve?

An interesting test case for the whole "under the radar sweet-spot" argument. If this principle worked, you should be able to pick your distribution cut offs (upper and lower), and some unusually high percentage of languages there should have some "good qualities" as per the sweet-spot.

Am I alone in thinking this is unlikely? ;-)

I posted this item because I thought the power law distribution aspect was interesting

I posted OO runtime graphs are scale-free for the same reason: it may not be an earth-shattering observation that object graphs exhibit a power-law distribution, but it certainly is a mildly interesting piece of trivia. Another piece of power-law trivia: On the Pareto distribution of Sourceforge project [PDF, 141K]. The long tail of software was mentioned here: http://bnoopy.typepad.com/bnoopy/2005/03/the_long_tail_o.html.