[Wellington-pm] Is Perl being overtaken by Ruby?

[michael@diaspora.gen.nz]

> Lies, damn lies, and statistics.

> On del.icio.us, the top three sites with 'perl' as their first tag have
> been
> saved by 751, 659, and 411 people.  Compare that to Ruby, and you get
> 3946,
> 3423, and 3260.  Or are the type of people who use a service like
> del.icio.us
> less likely to be Perl hackers for some reason?

You're assuming a correlation between people using Perl, and people
tagging Perl sites on del.icio.us.  I'd assume that people tagging sites
are interested in reading about or learning about the subject; I don't
quite see how this correlates with people using Perl.

As a different example, witness the amount of COBOL and REXX code still
being created, and the lack of exciting sites about them :).

Having said that, there's probably a derivative relationship; if the new
language being learnt is preferentially Ruby, then presumably over time
the Ruby using community will grow in size relative to the Perl using
community, with a (presumably) equivalent growth in the amount of deployed
code in Ruby vs Perl.

    -- michael.