"Fastest growing programming language"

[Kragen Sitaker]

In article <lcofuf54b5.fsf at gaffa.mit.edu>,
Douglas Alan  <nessus at mit.edu> wrote:
>What's the source for Python being the "fastest growing programming
>language"?  Just curious.

That's a stupid assertion; idiots, probably in marketing, are the only
possible source for such an assertion.  There are so many metrics of
the "size" of a language (number of programmers, percentage of
programmers, number of certified programmers, percentage of programmers
certified in the language, percentage of certified programmers
certified in the language, number of dollars in licensing revenue,
percentage of licensing-revenue dollars, amount of existing code,
number of dollars in consulting fees and salaries, percentage of
dollars in consulting fees and salaries, number of people using
software written in the language, percentage of computer users using
software written in the language, number of computers with development
tools for the language, percentage of computers (or of some particular
kind of computers, such as PCs) with development tools for the
language, number of CS classes taught in the language, percentage of CS
classes taught in the language, number of productions in the grammar,
number of bugs written in the language) and so many ways to compare
growth (measuring by percentage growth or absolute numbers, and
measuring over different time periods: the last day, the last week, the
last month, the last year, the last two years, the last five years),
and so many arbitrary ways to exclude languages from the list, that
nearly every language can correctly, but meaninglessly, be said to be
"the fastest growing computer language".

A quick search on Google shows that Java, Visual Basic, Perl, and
Smalltalk are all said to be "the fastest growing programming
language", while C++ is said to be "the fastest growing computer
language", Delphi is said to be "the fastest-growing language", and
Python is asserted to be "the fastest-growing open-source scripting
language" and "the fastest-growing scripting language".  For what it's
worth, I can't find any web pages that assert that COBOL is the
fastest-growing anything, but I'm sure they're out there.  (I just
found lots of web pages saying that the fastest-growing something or
other wants to hire COBOL programmers.)
-- 
<kragen at pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
Perilous to all of us are the devices of an art deeper than we possess
ourselves.
       -- Gandalf the White [J.R.R. Tolkien, "The Two Towers", Bk 3, Ch. XI]