I found this charting tool on Technorati today and thought it was an interesting way to quantify the buzz surrounding different keywords. For fun I’ve included a few charts here, comparing Perl and Ruby. It will be interesting to see how these change over time.
Blog posts in English per day over the past 30 days
| Perl Programming | Ruby Programming |
|---|---|
Get your own chart! |
Get your own chart! |
Observations
At the time of this post, there is a slight difference in scale between the Perl and Ruby charts — Ruby averages just a bit more than what Perl manages. Keep in mind this is only counting blog postings, so things like IRC and mailing list traffic are left out. There are other factors, too, such as the possibility that Ruby programmers are simply more vocal or more likely to have a blog.
Also note the marked increase in Perl posts around August 11th as Kirrily Robert pointed out in the comments. Also thanks to Kirrily for recommending a change to the keywords to include “programming”.
And as a final note, I’m not sure how reliable this information is. The chart seems to occasionally be missing some information, such as a section of time with no data. So ignore that if it comes up.
Take action!
The take-away of all of this, I suppose, is that we should be are being more vocal. Perl is an excellent and powerful programming language with a huge base of users. And did I mention we get CPAN and Catalyst? So get to Good work, Perl users — spread the word!
2 Comments
Huh, great stuff, Jason.
One thing I’ve noticed is that Perl people don’t tend to use “perl” as a tag in their blog posts. I know that Perl Buzz doesn’t, typically, because all our posts are about Perl and it’s not a useful distinction for us… but perhaps we should anyway? Over on use.perl.org the platform doesn’t support tags at all. Between the two of those, that could count for 50-100 posts a day, I suspect.
Another thing, just looking at the ruby posts, is that many of them aren’t about the programming language at all. From the first page, as I look at it right now, I see: “this is a blog with a Ruby Gloom layout”, “diamond and ruby studded shoes”, “meet the great ruby dog”, “due splendide cavalier ruby”, “Rolling Stones ‘Ruby Tuesday’”, “Ruby and I did our last weeks ironing”, “amichette cavalier ruby”, “to find that Ruby had tipped over”, something in Spanish about the Smashing Pumpkins, a gemstone spam blog, http://community.webshots.com/user/RubyAmelia , and “ruby, sapphire and diamond encrusted Rene Caovilla sandal”.
In fact, on the front page only 4 posts were about the programming language, 2 were in Asian languages I can’t even start to read and might have been about the language, and 14 weren’t about programming at all.
Compare the Perl list: at least 13/20 were actually about Perl (in fact some were duplicates with the Ruby list, where people said things like “Perl, Python, and Ruby”).
If you change the search to be “perl programming” and “ruby programming” you’ll see that we’re running more or less neck-and-neck since August 11th, when is when Schwern triggered the perl blogging push and I really started running with it.
Thanks for the comments, Kirrily. I changed the keywords to include “programming” as you suggested and that is a lot better. It’s still hard to judge whether or not that’s an accurate count but at least it appears closer.