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comp.lang.ruby

Community size

Dave Thomas

10/1/2004 2:13:00 PM

Folks:

I'm going to be giving a number of talks on Ruby over the next six
months, starting with one at Amazon next week. I'd like to include a
slide on the growth of the Ruby community over the last 4 years.

Does anyone have any metrics that I could use for this, or any ideas
for finding these kinds of figures?

Cheers

Dave
14 Answers

Mikael Brockman

10/1/2004 2:41:00 PM

0

Dave Thomas <dave@pragprog.com> writes:

> Folks:
>
> I'm going to be giving a number of talks on Ruby over the next six
> months, starting with one at Amazon next week. I'd like to include a
> slide on the growth of the Ruby community over the last 4 years.
>
> Does anyone have any metrics that I could use for this, or any ideas
> for finding these kinds of figures?

I'm running a script to tally the posts/year on ruby-talk. That's a
rough indicator, I guess. It might be an hour or so until it's done,
though.

Mikael Brockman

10/1/2004 3:01:00 PM

0

Dave Thomas <dave@pragprog.com> writes:

> Folks:
>
> I'm going to be giving a number of talks on Ruby over the next six
> months, starting with one at Amazon next week. I'd like to include a
> slide on the growth of the Ruby community over the last 4 years.
>
> Does anyone have any metrics that I could use for this, or any ideas
> for finding these kinds of figures?

Here's the number of posts for each year of ruby-talk:

{ "00"=>7380,
"99"=>858,
"01"=>21368,
"02"=>30313,
"03"=>28727,
"04"=>25459,
"98"=>160 }

I have to run. Bye!

Phlip

10/1/2004 3:25:00 PM

0

Dave Thomas wrote:

> I'm going to be giving a number of talks on Ruby over the next six
> months, starting with one at Amazon next week. I'd like to include a
> slide on the growth of the Ruby community over the last 4 years.
>
> Does anyone have any metrics that I could use for this, or any ideas
> for finding these kinds of figures?

How many magazine articles attend to Ruby? (Beyond "check out this weird
fringe language, dude!")

How many books use Ruby for their sample language? How many books are about
Ruby? What are their sales figures?

Irritatingly, most of the Agile & XP books use Java "because everyone else
was doing it". The authors wouldn't want their opinions about the language's
technical merits to affect their sales. These books will look quaint after
Agile & XP (and Pragmatism) outlive Java.

I use C++ for the hard fast layer and Ruby for the soft scripting layer in
all my projects. For example, here's the core of a C++ unit test:

rb_require("profile");
int state = productionCodeThatCallsRuby();
assert(0 == state);

rb_eval_string_protect("Profiler__.print_profile($stderr)", &state);
if (state)
push(rb_gv_get("$!"));
assert(0 == state);

Code elsewhere redirects $stderr into both a scrolling C++ window, and my
editor's Output panel. So when that unit test profiles the Ruby code, I can
read the output, immediately, in my IDE.

If any of that code experiences an (unintentional) Ruby error, it can call
push(rb_gv_get("$!")).

push() looks like this:

void
push(VALUE xyzIn)
{
VALUE str = rb_funcall(xyzIn, rb_intern("inspect"), 0);
OutputDebugStringA(STR2CSTR(str));
OutputDebugStringA("\n");
}

As a debugging aid, push takes any Ruby object, calls .inspect() on it, and
pushes the result into OutputDebugString(), which flows into my IDE's Output
panel.

The result of these tweaks - I can trace, profile, and unit test Ruby
straight out of my C++ editor, with round-trip support.

--
Phlip
http://industrialxp.org/community/bin/view/Main/TestFirstUser...

James Britt

10/1/2004 4:01:00 PM

0

Dave Thomas wrote:

> Folks:
>
> I'm going to be giving a number of talks on Ruby over the next six
> months, starting with one at Amazon next week. I'd like to include a
> slide on the growth of the Ruby community over the last 4 years.
>
> Does anyone have any metrics that I could use for this, or any ideas for
> finding these kinds of figures?


Web server stats?

I may have some decent log history for ruby-doc.org. Perhaps something
can be gleaned from the logs for that, rubygarden, rubycentral, etc.

And download stats from rubyforge.


James Britt

Eivind Eklund

10/1/2004 4:08:00 PM

0

On Fri, 1 Oct 2004 23:41:05 +0900, Mikael Brockman <mikael@phubuh.org> wrote:
> Dave Thomas <dave@pragprog.com> writes:
> > Does anyone have any metrics that I could use for this, or any ideas
> > for finding these kinds of figures?
>
> I'm running a script to tally the posts/year on ruby-talk. That's a
> rough indicator, I guess. It might be an hour or so until it's done,
> though.

I think that's a bad metric, because the mailing list has reached
"saturation" a long time ago - where the effort of tracking it is
limiting the size.

You might be able to get some metrics based on the number of mention
in Google, perhaps.

"Ruby language" is presently at 1.1 million vs 300 thousand for
"smalltalk language".

Another metric might be download counts - both from the main site and
from any packagers. For instance, the download counts from the
FreeBSD mirrors might be available - and the proportion of Ruby DLs
compared to the rest of the ports collection could be measured.

Or you could look at page views for RAA, if available.

Magazine articles and books have been mentioned, but these might be
hard to gather.

Eivind.

ptkwt

10/1/2004 5:15:00 PM

0

In article <0576BE8F-13B4-11D9-9EEB-000A95676A62@pragprog.com>,
Dave Thomas <dave@pragprog.com> wrote:
>Folks:
>
>I'm going to be giving a number of talks on Ruby over the next six
>months, starting with one at Amazon next week. I'd like to include a
>slide on the growth of the Ruby community over the last 4 years.
>
>Does anyone have any metrics that I could use for this, or any ideas
>for finding these kinds of figures?
>

Dave,

Are you finding that you're being asked to give more talks on Ruby in recent months?

Also, this site is titled "Programming Language Popularity":
http://www.dedasys.com/articles/language_popul...

It includes various metrics like job postings to Craigslist, Freshmeat projects, Google ad rates,
etc. Ruby is listed in the graphs there, but it doesn't come out very well in the results. I'm not
sure I agree with all of the methodology used to come up with the numbers, but you might find some
ideas there to further your own investigation.

Phil

gabriele renzi

10/1/2004 5:49:00 PM

0

Eivind Eklund ha scritto:


> You might be able to get some metrics based on the number of mention
> in Google, perhaps.
>
> "Ruby language" is presently at 1.1 million vs 300 thousand for
> "smalltalk language".


Remeber the "I love <somelang>" thread, and show that
"best programming language"
gives ruby-lang.org on google's "I feel lucky" search ;)

More seriously, I think 'programming ruby' is a better search.

It may be of interest to use the result from this script:
(10/2003)
http://groups.google.it/groups?hl=it&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=HJrob.386734%24R32.12803775%40ne...

updated here (5/2004):

http://groups.google.it/groups?q=g:thl3903811237d&dq=&hl=it&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=1gdq76m.166bs1k5tj8pbN%25aleaxit%4...

ok, the script is python and the latter link is in italian, but you
should only use the numbers ;)



> Or you could look at page views for RAA, if available.

and maybe the number of RAA packages too (maybe that should be merged
with rubyforge's projects, cause some on the latter may not be in the
former)

Oh, and btw #ruby-lang @ freenode is stable on ~150 users now, if
someone can get older data, I guess there were little more than 100 6
months ago :)

dblack

10/1/2004 5:51:00 PM

0

gabriele renzi

10/1/2004 7:42:00 PM

0


oh, another metric that would be somewhat interesting, even if maybe
completely useless:
lines of code in ruby cvs ;)

Florian Gross

10/1/2004 11:26:00 PM

0

Dave Thomas wrote:

> Folks:
>
> I'm going to be giving a number of talks on Ruby over the next six
> months, starting with one at Amazon next week. I'd like to include a
> slide on the growth of the Ruby community over the last 4 years.
>
> Does anyone have any metrics that I could use for this, or any ideas for
> finding these kinds of figures?

Maybe we should watch the number of results for
http://www.google.com/search?q=filetype:r... in the future?

> Cheers
> Dave

Regards,
Florian Gross