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From:	Kai-Martin Knaak <knaak AT iqo DOT uni-hannover DOT de>
Subject:	[geda-user] on the choice of languages
Date:	Fri, 13 Feb 2015 20:06:46 +0100
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With the lively discussion about the choice of languages I thought I'd do 
some statistics fun. 

The number of books available at amazon in the department "Programming 
Languages & Tools" seems to be a fairly sensible measure of the popularity 
of a language. I searched for the main candidates of the discussion. Here 
are the results:

"C"     : 11800 
"python": 890
"lua"   : 150
"guile" : 3  however, "scheme": 68

Now for the fun. I picked some natural languages so that the relative 
number of speakers is similar to the numbers of books in the list above. 
There is a wikipedia for all of these languages. Its size correlates with 
the number of speakers: 

computer     natural         native         wikipedia
language     language        speakers       articles
C         --> English   -->  1.5 billion    4.8 million  
python    --> German    -->  185 million    1.8 million
lua       --> Uzbek     -->   25 million    0.13 million
guile     --> Icelandic -->  320 thousand   0.038 million

(source: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ )

Of course, there are other factors at work, too. The relation is not 
strictly proportional. Actually, the icelandic wikipedia is fairly large 
compared to others with similar number of speakers. But it illustrates how 
much the choice of language matters. An encyclopedia with 40 000 articles 
may be usable. But it is far from the state the large languages versions 
have achieved.

---<)kaimartin(>---
-- 
Kai-Martin Knaak                                  tel: +49-511-762-2895
Universität Hannover, Inst. für Quantenoptik      fax: +49-511-762-2211	
Welfengarten 1, 30167 Hannover           http://www.iqo.uni-hannover.de
GPG key:    http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?search=Knaak+kmk&op=get

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