News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Coconut – Pythonic functional programming language by infodroid on Thursday June 23, 2016 @05:28PM (#11964442)
> ...joining the over 30,000 people already using Coconut...

This triggered my BS detector.

It turns out 30,000 is the sum of all downloads on PyPI since the very first version was released. But there are only 534 downloads on average for each release since version 0.2.2, excluding the blip for 0.3.2. So there is no way there are on the order of 30k users when downloads are roughly 1.8% of that for each release.

This matters because exaggerated claims reduce trustworthiness in a project and are off-putting to potential users.

Re:Coconut – Pythonic functional programming language by coconutlang on Thursday June 23, 2016 @09:09PM (#11965533)
I should have been more careful with the wording and specified downloads instead of people. I also assumed the statistic was accurate and bots weren't an issue, which is probably wrong. Regardless, it's been removed.
Re:Coconut – Pythonic functional programming language by 88e282102ae2e5b on Thursday June 23, 2016 @06:59PM (#11964916)
Did they find a way to remove bots from the download statistics? My very obscure image library had over 2 million downloads despite an estimated 10 to 20 users, which would make 30,000 effectively equal zero.
Re:Coconut – Pythonic functional programming language by Bromskloss on Thursday June 23, 2016 @05:37PM (#11964479)
Since they just before that wrote that all valid Python is valid Coconut, I thought that it would be a joke about every Python user being a Coconut user.
Re:Coconut – Pythonic functional programming language by spraak on Thursday June 23, 2016 @07:36PM (#11965096)
That's actually how I read it until I saw the comment a above and reread it
Re:Coconut – Pythonic functional programming language by infodroid on Thursday June 23, 2016 @05:39PM (#11964494)
Are you saying there are only around 30k Python users? :)
Re:Coconut – Pythonic functional programming language by Bromskloss on Thursday June 23, 2016 @07:07PM (#11964967)
Nah, when I got to the number, I realised that it wasn't going to be a joke like I thought.