Python at sourceforge

[Roeland Rengelink]

Hi,

I've wasted an afternoon getting to know htmllib. In the process I 
gathered the following information that readers of this newsgroup might 
find interesting

One measure of the relative popularity of programming languages in the
open source community may be the number of sourceforge projects that
use these programming languages.

I have extracted the following statistics on Python, Perl, Java and C
from the sourceforge trove listing.
http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/trove_list.php

The absolute numbers refer to the number of projects --with a
registration date before the date in the table-- that list the given
language as (one of) their programming languages.

Relative numbers are given with respect to the number of projects at
01-jan-2000 and with respect to the number of python projects.

  date    absolute numbers   relative numbers    rel. numbers
                             (00-01-01 = 1.00)  (python = 1.00)
         Pyth Perl Java    C   Py Perl Java    C Perl Java    C
00-01-01   28   63   32  185  1.0  1.0  1.0  1.0 2.25 1.14 6.61
00-02-01   63  122   91  365  2.2  1.9  2.8  2.0 1.94 1.44 5.79
00-03-01   91  169  135  516  3.2  2.7  4.2  2.8 1.86 1.48 5.67
00-04-01  121  242  210  719  4.3  3.8  6.6  3.9 2.00 1.74 5.94
00-05-01  157  317  281  934  5.6  5.0  8.8  5.0 2.02 1.79 5.95
00-06-01  213  413  368 1203  7.6  6.6 11.5  6.5 1.94 1.73 5.65
00-07-01  258  527  479 1462  9.2  8.4 15.0  7.9 2.04 1.86 5.67
00-08-01  311  642  602 1727 11.1 10.2 18.8  9.3 2.06 1.94 5.55
00-09-01  366  782  760 2020 13.1 12.4 23.8 10.9 2.14 2.08 5.52
00-10-01  414  908  900 2270 14.8 14.4 28.1 12.3 2.19 2.17 5.48
00-11-01  464 1030 1081 2542 16.6 16.3 33.8 13.7 2.22 2.33 5.48
00-12-01  520 1174 1265 2813 18.6 18.6 39.5 15.2 2.26 2.43 5.41
01-01-01  566 1294 1438 3044 20.2 20.5 44.9 16.5 2.29 2.54 5.38
01-02-01  637 1435 1638 3368 22.8 22.8 51.2 18.2 2.25 2.57 5.29
01-03-01  695 1578 1846 3681 24.8 25.0 57.7 19.9 2.27 2.66 5.30
01-04-01  758 1734 2115 4018 27.1 27.5 66.1 21.7 2.29 2.79 5.30
01-05-01  813 1888 2318 4339 29.0 30.0 72.4 23.5 2.32 2.85 5.34
01-06-01  887 2005 2533 4605 31.7 31.8 79.2 24.9 2.26 2.86 5.19
01-07-01  936 2130 2708 4858 33.4 33.8 84.6 26.3 2.28 2.89 5.19
01-08-01  997 2243 2916 5130 35.6 35.6 91.1 27.7 2.25 2.92 5.15
01-09-01 1014 2278 2963 5202 36.2 36.2 92.6 28.1 2.25 2.92 5.13

Interesting conclusions:

- The relative number of Python and Perl projects have remained
  constant over the past two years
- Java was initially the most rapidly growing of the four languages,
  but relative numbers with respect to Python an Perl have stabelized
  over the last 5 months.
- The relative number of C projects has been declining slowly but 
  steadily

A big caveat:

Listed are the number of projects that have been started, no attempt 
has been made to weigh the succesfullness of these projects (measured 
for instance by either current status or activity ranking)

Reactions?

Roeland

-- 
r.b.rigilink at chello.nl

"Half of what I say is nonsense. Unfortunately I don't know which half"