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
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.
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!
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.
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
In article <0576BE8F-13B4-11D9-9EEB-000A95676A62@pragprog.com>,
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_popularity.html
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
Dave Thomas <dave@pragprog.com> wrote:
Hi --
On Fri, 1 Oct 2004, 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?
RubyConf attendance is around 60, whereas it's averaged about 45 (I
think) in past years. I can get you more accurate figures, if that
sounds like something you'd want to include.
David
--
David A. Black
dblack@wobblini.net
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 filetype:rb inurl:rb - Google Search in the future?
Cheers
Dave
Regards,
Florian Gross
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.
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.
Maybe we should watch the number of results for
filetype:rb inurl:rb - Google Search in the future?
filetype:cpp inurl:cpp gives about 200,000
whereas .pl gives about 5 million. and .php 17 million
that''s probably due to the abundance of cgi scripts of perl
and dynamic php webpages, not actual source code,
All you can tell from these numbers is that
*apparently* there are not many webpages written in C++
--
--- vruz
Florian Gross wrote:
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 filetype:rb inurl:rb - Google Search in the future?
Has anyone suggested considering the number of RubyForge projects registered over time? Or the number of project downloads, or new releases, etc.? Not sure if those statistics are available or not...
--
Jamis Buck
jgb3@email.byu.edu
http://www.jamisbuck.org/jamis
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%40news2.tin.it
updated here (5/2004):
http://groups.google.it/groups?q=g:thl3903811237d&dq=&hl=it&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=1gdq76m.166bs1k5tj8pbN%25aleaxit%40yahoo.com
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 
The RubyForge webalizer stats are rather nifty:
although I think they mainly reflect folks moving stuff to RubyForge and
not necessarily the growth of Ruby as a whole...
Yours,
tom
On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 19:50, Jamis Buck wrote:
Florian Gross wrote:
> 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?
>
Has anyone suggested considering the number of RubyForge projects
registered over time? Or the number of project downloads, or new
releases, etc.? Not sure if those statistics are available or not...
oh, another metric that would be somewhat interesting, even if maybe completely useless:
lines of code in ruby cvs 
Tom Copeland ha scritto:
The RubyForge webalizer stats are rather nifty:
although I think they mainly reflect folks moving stuff to RubyForge and
not necessarily the growth of Ruby as a whole...
well, moving stuff at least is a sign of 'consolidation'