Python use growing or shrinking

[Laura Creighton]

> Laura Creighton wrote:
> 
> > This is not the sort of question that lends itself to finding a
> > 'representative number'.  Web pages do not happen according to any
> > natural distribution, thus they are 100% convenience sampling.
> 
> Naturally, we've already been through that even in this thread.  We're
> just talking about the proper representation of the figures which have
> unspecified meaning, rather than what those figures should mean.

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.

You said:

>It's a good question.  Perhaps the arithmetic mean, geometric mean, or
>even the median of all of them.  Perhaps even the results of the top
>ranker, and then everything is represented as a percentile of the front
>(again, not percentage of the total, but percentage of the front
>runner).  The latter has the benefit of being totally impervious to the
>addition of new elements (unless, of course, when added they rank first
>:-).

What do getting out statistical methods help?  You can have lots of
fun applying statistical methods to noise and getting things that look
meaningful, but they aren't.  You can do no meaningful statistical
sampling on number of web pages to get any results that require
probability sampling.  People get paid to create web pages.  Timothy Vue
can talk all he likes about his language of the future, but as far
as I know it still has 0 users.  Stephen Deibel is working his tail
off helping edit and produce Python Success Stories.  Among other
things, he hopes that this will increase the number of people who will
plunk down some money and buy Wing IDE from him. You cannot just
'smooth all these differences out' assuming this will even out in the
population.  It doesn't.

Laura Creighton