Re:Linux Journal: Readers' Choice Awards 2010 - Best Program...
by nickpinkston on Monday November 01, 2010 @09:04AM
(#1856260)
Do you think the large gap between Python and Ruby on this is due to the Mac (I.e non-FOSS) bent that is in the Ruby community? It seems like Python guys are more OS neutral IMO.
Re:Linux Journal: Readers' Choice Awards 2010 - Best Program...
by nikcub on Monday November 01, 2010 @09:31AM
(#1856340)
Uncertain, I would love to find out. A good way to do it would be to use data from GitHub/BitKeeper/Google Code to find user platform and dev language (rather than using a survey).
I have had this in the back of my mind for a while now, initially I was going to survey these repos for some numbers on which open source licenses are being used the most - because I have a feeling that more and more code is being released under more liberal BSD/MIT/Apache style licenses over GPL.
Could also collect other interesting stats and publish the results. It would be awesome if GitHub or one of the others had an OKCupid style blog showing trends/stats. Even if they anonymize the data and hand it to somebody else to do (and get it from the others as well)
Actually if anybody wants to work on a weekend project to grep all these repos for some interesting stats, let me know.
Re:Linux Journal: Readers' Choice Awards 2010 - Best Program...
by ericlc on Monday November 01, 2010 @10:41AM
(#1856601)
There is a strange feedback occurring. Magazines cover topics their readers are interested in while simultaneously affecting their readers' interests and preferences.
Re:Linux Journal: Readers' Choice Awards 2010 - Best Program...
by fiveo on Monday November 01, 2010 @10:39AM
(#1856596)
There are some truth in your statement. But as for Ruby (and Rails), for those who bought the magazine would be greeted by a person's column (sorry I forgot his name, but he has a PhD I think) who always covered what the Ruby crowds are into (i.e. Ruby, Rails, plugins, jQuery, MongoDB, etc).
ie. The results inevidably reflect the editorial opinion of LinuxJournal, since most of those who answer the survey are likely to source their information from the magazine.
As an example, take revision-control. The winner was git, but unusually CVS and subversion finished above bazaar and mercurial (and other more modern systems).
Google results:
CVS or subversion, number of articles in LJ, the past 12 months:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cvs+OR+subversion+site:linuxj...
9 results
Mercurial or Bazaar:
http://www.google.com/search?q=bazaar+OR+mercurial+site:linu...
0 results
Git had 18 articles.
Same with Python (143 results) and Ruby (32 results). Further the coverage of Python is extremely positive, with a number of feature articles - while for Ruby (no rating at all) there are no featured articles.
The results of this survey shouldn't be seen as a study of the best, or even the most popular technologies - since for all the categories that I checked, the results and order of results matched the number of times that product or technology had been covered in LinuxJournal.