Python use growing or shrinking

Erik Max Francis max at alcyone.com
Fri Jan 24 19:15:27 EST 2003


Laura Creighton wrote:

> Then I don't understand the post you replied to.
> 
> Terry Hancock wrote:
> 
> > Yeah, maybe I should've mentioned that -- one might try to think of
> > these
> > numbers as being percentages of "all software development pages",
> > but of
> > course, they're not. It's just a percentage of the pages listed.  It
> > might
> > make more sense to scale relative to one representative member. But
> > which
> > one?
> 
> Terry Hancock has a problem.  He wants to get some sort of meaningful
> number out of the data, because he wants there to be some sort of
> relationship between pages listed and people who are using Python.
> There isn't any.

The problem is you're taking this fragment out of context.  Read further
back in the thread to the post of mine that Terry was responding to, and
then back to the post that I was responding to.  We were simply talking
about whether to represent these arbitrary figures (which we explicitly
disclaimed have little meaning) as a percentage of the total, or whether
they should be normalized to a single figure.

The difference is that we _know_ that the numbers don't really mean
anything.  The original Web site we were talking about was presenting
similar numbers, obtained through unspecified means, and _was_ claiming
that they meant something.

-- 
 Erik Max Francis / max at alcyone.com / http://www.alcyone.com/max/
 __ San Jose, CA, USA / 37 20 N 121 53 W / &tSftDotIotE
/  \ I grow with each breath that I take / I cherish my freedom
\__/ Chante Moore
    ZOE / http://www.alcyone.com/pyos/zoe/
 A simple Python OpenGL rendering engine.




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