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A comment on What is going on with measures of programming language popularity?.

Re:What is going on with measures of programming language po... by thebooglebooski on Monday October 01, 2018 @03:09PM (#18115796)
I don't really understand how you can measure popularity without doing a census-like survey, reaching out to every developer possible in a coordinated effort.

Awhile back, I took a statistics class that explained how polling everyone by calling everyone with a phone landline resulted in a misrepresented sample.

The reason: not everyone has a phone landline. And those with phone landlines had a tendency to belong to specific demographics.

So...if you survey everyone using Github, and not every developer uses Github, are you not prone to the same fallacy?

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Re:What is going on with measures of programming language po... by GFischer on Monday October 01, 2018 @05:37PM (#18117037)
One example off the top of my head are the billions of lines of Cobol code that are certainly not on GitHub :) .

I'm not sure if Cobol programmers use StackExchange (I guess they do).

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