Feature idea: Trend reporting

[Rick Wayne]

As a sometime tech journalist and longtime developer, I care about the
relative popularity of programming languages. But frequently what
concerns me even more is not a language's position, but its first
derivative: What's the trend? Scala has tiny mindshare, but is it
growing as more developers realize that multicore actually is hard?
Has Ruby peaked?

One way to visualize the data would be a three-in-one bar graph:
percent change over the past month, year, and five years as three
colors overlaid on a single horizontal bar. (Of course the origin
would have to be in the center of the graph!)

Or you could just pick one period to highlight, and color your regular
popularity bar graph appropriately, using a stoplight spectrum. E.g.,
Java has the biggest popularity bar, but it's red, indicating negative
mindshare growth (I have no idea if that's true, BTW).

Nice tool. Going to be coming back to it.

[David Welton]

On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 6:15 PM, Rick Wayne <few...@gmail.com> wrote:
> As a sometime tech journalist and longtime developer, I care about the
> relative popularity of programming languages. But frequently what
> concerns me even more is not a language's position, but its first
> derivative: What's the trend? Scala has tiny mindshare, but is it
> growing as more developers realize that multicore actually is hard?
> Has Ruby peaked?

That's an excellent point. Something like Cobol is still widely used
in banks and things of that ilk... however it is probably decelerating
or at best at a steady "velocity", whereas things like Javascript or
Scala, like you say are "accelerating" in their uptake.

> One way to visualize the data would be a three-in-one bar graph:
> percent change over the past month, year, and five years as three
> colors overlaid on a single horizontal bar. (Of course the origin
> would have to be in the center of the graph!)

I do have some timelines, but they're not very visible, and to date
don't really show a great deal of change.

http://www.langpop.com/timeline.html

I suppose I need to fiddle with the site's design to give them more
prominence, as well as have another look at the data and see about
ways to display it a bit better.

> Or you could just pick one period to highlight, and color your regular
> popularity bar graph appropriately, using a stoplight spectrum. E.g.,
> Java has the biggest popularity bar, but it's red, indicating negative
> mindshare growth (I have no idea if that's true, BTW).
>
> Nice tool. Going to be coming back to it.

Thanks!

--
David N. Welton

http://www.welton.it/davidw/

http://www.dedasys.com/