X-Authentication-Warning: delorie.com: mail set sender to geda-user-bounces using -f X-Recipient: geda-user AT delorie DOT com X-Injected-Via-Gmane: http://gmane.org/ To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com From: Kai-Martin Knaak Subject: [geda-user] on the choice of languages Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2015 20:06:46 +0100 Organization: Institut =?UTF-8?B?ZsO8cg==?= Quantenoptik Lines: 57 Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" X-Complaints-To: usenet AT ger DOT gmane DOT org X-Gmane-NNTP-Posting-Host: 130.75.103.107 User-Agent: KNode/4.14.1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by delorie.com id t1DIxP93005389 Reply-To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com 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