"You're holding a radio device, using a service that MUST know your approximate location in order to be able to work. Your expectation of "privacy" MIGHT be reasonable for the content of your conversation (since another party is involved, too), but as for your location, sorry, there is no reasonable expectation. "
Repeat: it doesn't matter what YOUR expectation is. What matters, under the law, is what the AVERAGE reasonable person, who is not an expert or a techie, expects. And my bet is that the average person expects that information to be private.
" And 'ignorant' doesn't mean 'reasonable'."
On the contrary: in some circumstances, that is exactly what it means. The law is modeled after the average reasonable person. It doesn't matter if the average person is ignorant of how a piece of tech works. It is what that average person expects, regardless of any technical ignorance, that is supposed to be the model for the law. YOU might not like that idea, but that is, in fact, how the law works.
" I see what you did there. You swapped the word 'reasonable' with the word 'average'."
No, I didn't. I am using them together to try to get this idea across to you.
I just went and took their test. And their program was full of bugs.
One page registered clicks when I hadn't made any. At least one other didn't show the running score as it was supposed to. And at the end, when it came to scoring, it showed that most of my scores were exactly 0, when in fact they were anything but!
No wonder their results don't agree with just about anybody else. Drawing conclusions from invalid data will probably not get you anything but egg on your face.
"Rather, the study determined three factors â" reasoning, short-term memory and verbal ability â" that combined to create human intelligence or âoecognitive profile.â
Uh... pardon me, researcher guys, but WTF do you think IQ tests typically MEASURE??? Hint: short-term memory, reasoning, and verbal ability!!!
The idea that IQ is bullshit, is bullshit. There is a very long and well estblished, very strong statistical correlation between high IQ and all three of these factors.
From what I read of TFA, whoever did the study doesn't know squat about prior research into IQ.
Granted: no one number can measure everything. And IQ doesn't pretend to. There is still a great deal of debate about what IQ actually means, in regard to a person's overall intelligence. But what is known is that the statistical correlation is very real, and no single, shoddy study, no matter how many participants, will make that go away.
"Viz. the conditions inside these reactors would be absurdly corrosive. F salts are chemically aggressive, and that aggressive increases with temperature."
The MSRE reactor proved this to be false. According to Wikipedia: "For example, it was demonstrated that: the fuel salt was immune to radiation damage, the graphite was not attacked by the fuel salt, and the corrosion of Hastelloy-N was negligible."
That reactor was operated for 5 years. No problems. It was shown that plain fluorine can escape from the salt, but only at low temperatures... not while the reactor is in operation.
There IS a real issue, but it is not from fluorine and is solvable: "One unexpected finding was shallow, inter-granular cracking in all metal surfaces exposed to the fuel salt. The cause of the embrittlement was tellurium - a fission product generated in the fuel. The crack growth was rapid enough to become a problem over the planned thirty-year life of a follow-on thorium breeder reactor... This cracking could be reduced by adding small amounts of niobium to the Hastelloy-N."
And you're trying to get in the (nonsensical) last word.
LISP has been declining for decades. Is it dead? How about SmallTalk?
Long ago, assembly language was pretty far up there in the list. It is much lower down now, but (for obvious reasons) it is in no danger of dying.
Java has been in steady decline since about 2000. Is it dead?
C (according to Ohloh and less so TIOBE) has been in in rather sharp decline since 2006. Is it dead? In danger of dying?
You're full of nonsense.
According to the TIOBE graph, Ruby is almost exactly where it was in mid-2007. Using YOUR own source, Ohloh, in order to get a more visible scale, I graphed just Ruby. And guess what? Sure, it's a bit down from 2010, but it's about where it was in mid-2009, and way ABOVE where it was in 2006 and 2007. Again: if you can ignore some spikes in the JavaScript graph, I can ignore some short spikes in the Ruby graph.
I keep tellin' ya, man. You aren't reading the actual data properly. Go ahead and think I am insane if you want to. I'd be willing to bet I got better scores in my university statistics classes than you did.
After skimming the other posts here, I don't see where anybody else noticed that this came only a day or two after Ars Technica published a story about how statistics show a NEGATIVE correlation between violent video games and actual violence.
"It's now one of the first things done in any lost person situation."
Then there should be no problem at all calling that "probable cause" and obtaining a warrant to do it. In practice, that can usually be done in less than an hour.
"They can't get security camera tapes from a bank that was held up without a warrant? They can't gain access to information about who is driving your car without a warrant? I think it should be presumed there are lots of things a government can get access to without a warrant. "
I think you're looking at it the wrong way.
Consider land-line phones. The wires are publicly accessible. It takes no special equipment (I know this for a fact) in order to hook up to someone's phone line and listen to their conversations, even though those conversations are being transmitted through public property and through a third party. Without knowing who is calling whom, your location can't be tracked. But certainly, the phone company has a record that a call was made from that number (that location) at that time.
Now, for cell phones: in general, people use them (as phones) as they would land-line phones. They probably, and quite reasonably, expect a similar level of privacy. What real difference does it make whether it is "public airwaves" or "publicly accessible wires"?
In the judge's own words, the legal standard is "the amount of privacy a reasonable person would expect". I submit that the majority of the public expects their location information to be private. Whether YOU think that is reasonable is irrelevant. It is what the "average" person expects that counts.
No, you claimed that Ruby was, in your own words, "... a dying little niche language" that nobody cared about. Your own figures show that to be false. Sure, maybe it's in very slightly less use than it was a few years ago, but it's hardly dying, and there is a rather large (in an absolute, not comparative sense) community of developers who do care about it.
"The claim was that ruby was declining in popularity."
Stop moving the goalposts. You did not. You claimed that it was dying and that nobody cared about it. Yet you have shown nothing of the sort.
"This was your original point: "According to the TIOBE Index, Ruby moved up on the list again this month.""
Which is pretty clearly true, according to TIOBE itself and your own references. And none of your extensive ranting refutes that.
"Which was intended to suggest that Ruby was not, in fact, dying."
I see. So you are reading minds now, too? Incredible.
"With Ruby clearly in decline..."
I did not dispute that Ruby was relatively flat or may have even declined (actually, according to your own charts, it's stayed pretty flat if you ignore a few short-term spikes). That was never my argument, and I clearly stated as much several posts ago. But that wasn't YOUR original argument. MY argument with you is that it isn't dying, and there are lots of people who care about it. But I see that I was just feeding a troll.
"The downward trend is clear as crystal."
No, it is not. By YOUR OWN data. If you look at the charts, it is roughly the same as it has been for several years, if you ignore some short-term spikes in the charts. Just as you proposed to do for JavaScript. If you can ignore some short-term spikes for JavaScript, then I can do the same for Ruby. You can't have that both ways.
There may still have been a very slight decline even if you ignore the spikes, but it is hardly significant.
"The data from RedMonk does not show a trend as it's a single snapshot."
Hah. But YOU tried to argue earlier that another shapshot was valid. I pointed that out quite a while ago. If you can do it, so can I. You can't have these things both ways, man.
Chinese, Hindi or the like are tempting, but a lot of work to make real inroads, and in case you hadn't noticed, there really isn't a big percentage of quality software coming to the Western world from those places. I'm not implying anything, just stating facts.
There IS a lot of quality software coming out of Germany and the Russian Federation, though.
"It's obvious to anyone capable of looking at the chart. I honestly don't see how you can continue to deny this, or why you'd even bother."
I'm not the one who is not paying attention here. I didn't deny this at all. In fact I explicitly acknowledged (go back and read again) that some of those sources showed Ruby's popularity over the last few years to be rather flat. It's right there in black and white. Why didn't you see that, or pay attention to it?
REPEAT: What I claimed was that Ruby was up LAST MONTH. None of your sources contradict that.
"TechCrunch is reporting on RedMonk's language ratings. I included that link as I thought that a simplified exposition would be helpful. I guess I was wrong..."
And once again: in my last post I mentioned that it was "RedMonk (via TechCrunch)..." but you apparently didn't see that either. Even so, proof that I understood who the source was is still there, in black and white.
"Again, all the data suggests that ruby is either flat or in decline. The TIOBE data shows that it's in decline and starting to flatten out (that's not growth) The data from RedMonk show Ruby to be flat (that's not growth). The data from Ohloh suggest that ruby is either flat or in slight decline. (They're NOT "dramatically different" at all. I'd say they agree remarkably well, especially considering that their methods for determining popularity are so dramatically different!)"
No, ALL the data do not. Once again, look at RedMonk's chart. REPEAT: it shows commits to Ruby projects to be above Perl and nearly level with C. This was data you referenced yourself.
I'm not making claims like that of my own, but very clearly, ALL the data do not show what you claim.
"If you read my post, I suggested that ruby's rise in popularity and subsequent decline was tied directly to RoR."
I don't care. My post was about Ruby, not Rails, and that is what you were replying to. Perhaps your point about Rails is significant, perhaps not, but showing that Rails had declined means nothing unless you can SHOW that there is a cause-effect link between that and the popularity of Ruby. You have not done so; you have merely made a bald, unsupported assertion.
" (Necessary, as using ruby by itself pulls in too much irrelevant data -- so much so that the chart runs nearly flat, as you would expect if you were searching for a common term like "emerald" or "gold" or "women".)"
That is the weirdest argument yet. As an analogy, that is rather like saying you are using Shelby Cobras as a proxy for all Fords, because searching just for Fords pulls in too many results.
"Why is this so important to you? Why do you even care that ruby is in decline?"
Who said I cared about that? The only reason I have been contradicting you is because you have been making ridiculous arguments and then claim to have actually demonstrated your point, when actually you have done nothing of the sort. You could have been arguing about ant farms, I don't care. You didn't even contradict my original point. So: why are YOU so adamant about it, to the point of making logically absurd arguments (Rails proxy, indeed)??
"I'm not surprised. You don't seem terribly interested in the data at all."
It depends on whose data you are looking at. But I repeat: at least two sources said Ruby was UP in popularity last month. That is the statement you seem to have been arguing with (either than or my claim that Ruby is not "niche")... I made no significant claims about its performance over a period of years. Yes, it does show rather flat, according to at least some of those datasets. But in others, no. Once again, according to your own reference: Redmonk (via TechCrunch) shows Ruby to be well ahead of Perl and almost even with C. Are YOU ignoring THAT data?
I suppose it depends on who you want to believe.
"You can't, however, argue the fact that the data presented shows Ruby to be flat or still in decline."
I most certainly can. Once again, Redmonk shows it well above Perl, and both TIOBE and one other reference of yours show it to be UP in popularity last month.
"I know that you like ruby, and that ruby is important to you."
That is completely irrelevant. In my opinion, looking at your own data, I think you are showing significant "confirmation bias".
" But I think TIOBE's ratings are usually a bit odd (Javascript and C# being so low is astounding), so I wouldn't necessarily use this low rating to prove my point either."
Having been in the industry for many years, I do not find their placement of JavaScript or C# odd at all.
However, if you want to look at other sources, see that other poster's comment with all the links in it. Many of those sources rank Ruby higher than the TIOBE Index does.
Regardless, I disagree. Visual Basic.NET, for example, which is below Ruby in the list, is not a "niche" language either, since it can be used for creating general-purpose desktop apps or web pages or services, as the programmer desires. In fact there was a time when Visual Basic was the only game in town if you wanted to program for Windows in anything other than C, and at that time Microsoft was not publishing most of the C API anyway, so if you wanted to use that you were pretty much SOL. Not that Visual Basic has anywhere near the same relevance anymore, but it is hardly "niche".
In the same vein, Ruby is not limited to web pages via Rails or Sinatra. It is perfectly capable of general-purpose apps, and if you want UI you can use Wx or Qt or Shoes or MacRuby or... the list goes on. Compiled, or at least bytecode-compiled? JRuby, Rubinius, Parrot, or some of the other variants.
Heck, I did a very nice (at least in the customer's opinion) desktop app in MacRuby last year. Native Cocoa UI and everything. It is a native desktop OS X app in every way.
Would somebody care to explain to me why I got modded down for merely making factual statements about well-respected, freely available industry data?
As someone else pointed out (see the post with all the links), several other respected industry sources also say that Ruby is up in popularity, and some of them rank it as high as #5.
"You don't seem to understand that chart, the methodology, or statistics in general."
Apparently I understand them better than you do.
(1) Ohloh disagrees with TIOBE rather drastically. One or the other is wrong. Which one is hard to say, but TIOBE has a pretty good reputation in the industry.
(2) Your Python data shows a difference between 2011 and 2012. I clearly referred to differences between 2007 and 2012. In case you didn't know, there is a pretty big difference. The graph on that Pydatalog page also disagrees with both TIOBE and Ohloh. Which is correct?
(3) Your third link is about Rails, not Ruby. Again, there is a rather large difference. They are far from the same things.
(4) Your 4th reference shows, just as TIOBE (and I) stated, that Ruby is up in popularity this month. It also divides languages into "general purpose" and "scripting" languages, which is pretty much an obsolete designation these days. It appears that what they really mean is compiled versus interpreted. However, there are at least a couple of different ways to compile Ruby today (JRuby being just one example).
(5) Your 5th reference claims to show a graph of the TIOBE Index but the graph is actually nothing at all like the actual TIOBE index. Therefore I have to question the rest of their data as well. In addition, like some of the other references you gave, it doesn't show trends, which was the whole topic under discussion.
(6) As far as TechCrunch is concerned, NOBODY else comes even close to agreeing with their results. (But then, what they chart there is not at all the same as what the others are claiming to chart.) So who is right? However, TechCrunch DOES show Ruby right up there at the top, higher than Perl and very near C. And TechCrunch does support my assertion that Objective-C came from near the bottom to near the top in recent years.
Now, what was it you wanted to teach me about statistics?
"It was too old to make my earlier list (January 2012), but it's still quite relevant and informative. It should also help you make much better sense of the TIOBE data."
I disagree on several levels. Not only is it a year old (2011 data is all they claim), it does not agree with TIOBE at all.
"Last time I looked for jobs, it was full of Java and C#."
That's because during much of the last decade, Java and C# were among the languages in high demand. Which establishes a code base, which then has to be upgraded and maintained. And as you probably know, there is generally more work overall in upgrading and maintenance than there is in writing novel code.
However, that is no indication whatever that very much new is being done with Java or C#. Something to keep in mind.
During that time, languages like Python and (in just the last 5 years or so, which is a very brief time) Ruby have become the languages of choice for many people who are doing new work.
"Languages such as Java, C/C++, C#, PHP, and Visual Basic are FAR FAR FAR more commonly used than Ruby or Python. Those two are niche languages by almost anyone's definition."
Not so. Ruby continues to become more popular, and is already significantly ahead of JavaScript,.NET (except C#), LISP, etc. I don't see you can call anything in TIOBE's "A" list a "niche" product.
Ruby has moved down a notch in the list since 2007, but that's just because Objective-C suddenly jumped into the A list, near the top. Other languages like PHP and.NET (again, except for C# in particular) have gone down 2 or more notches during the same period.
Slashdot Mirror
"You're holding a radio device, using a service that MUST know your approximate location in order to be able to work. Your expectation of "privacy" MIGHT be reasonable for the content of your conversation (since another party is involved, too), but as for your location, sorry, there is no reasonable expectation. "
Repeat: it doesn't matter what YOUR expectation is. What matters, under the law, is what the AVERAGE reasonable person, who is not an expert or a techie, expects. And my bet is that the average person expects that information to be private.
" And 'ignorant' doesn't mean 'reasonable'."
On the contrary: in some circumstances, that is exactly what it means. The law is modeled after the average reasonable person. It doesn't matter if the average person is ignorant of how a piece of tech works. It is what that average person expects, regardless of any technical ignorance, that is supposed to be the model for the law. YOU might not like that idea, but that is, in fact, how the law works.
" I see what you did there. You swapped the word 'reasonable' with the word 'average'."
No, I didn't. I am using them together to try to get this idea across to you.
Funny!
I just went and took their test. And their program was full of bugs.
One page registered clicks when I hadn't made any. At least one other didn't show the running score as it was supposed to. And at the end, when it came to scoring, it showed that most of my scores were exactly 0, when in fact they were anything but!
No wonder their results don't agree with just about anybody else. Drawing conclusions from invalid data will probably not get you anything but egg on your face.
"Another Slashdotter pissed off to find that she's not as smart as she thought she was."
Ah, don't be so hard on yourself. After all, they disagree with just about everybody else in the cognitive sciences.
Sure, there is lots of debate about just what significance IQ has, but to call it completely invalid is demonstrably just BS.
"Rather, the study determined three factors â" reasoning, short-term memory and verbal ability â" that combined to create human intelligence or âoecognitive profile.â
Uh... pardon me, researcher guys, but WTF do you think IQ tests typically MEASURE??? Hint: short-term memory, reasoning, and verbal ability!!!
The idea that IQ is bullshit, is bullshit. There is a very long and well estblished, very strong statistical correlation between high IQ and all three of these factors.
From what I read of TFA, whoever did the study doesn't know squat about prior research into IQ.
Granted: no one number can measure everything. And IQ doesn't pretend to. There is still a great deal of debate about what IQ actually means, in regard to a person's overall intelligence. But what is known is that the statistical correlation is very real, and no single, shoddy study, no matter how many participants, will make that go away.
"Viz. the conditions inside these reactors would be absurdly corrosive. F salts are chemically aggressive, and that aggressive increases with temperature."
The MSRE reactor proved this to be false. According to Wikipedia: "For example, it was demonstrated that: the fuel salt was immune to radiation damage, the graphite was not attacked by the fuel salt, and the corrosion of Hastelloy-N was negligible."
That reactor was operated for 5 years. No problems. It was shown that plain fluorine can escape from the salt, but only at low temperatures... not while the reactor is in operation.
There IS a real issue, but it is not from fluorine and is solvable: "One unexpected finding was shallow, inter-granular cracking in all metal surfaces exposed to the fuel salt. The cause of the embrittlement was tellurium - a fission product generated in the fuel. The crack growth was rapid enough to become a problem over the planned thirty-year life of a follow-on thorium breeder reactor... This cracking could be reduced by adding small amounts of niobium to the Hastelloy-N."
By the way: here is that graph I mentioned. From your own source.
And you're trying to get in the (nonsensical) last word.
LISP has been declining for decades. Is it dead? How about SmallTalk?
Long ago, assembly language was pretty far up there in the list. It is much lower down now, but (for obvious reasons) it is in no danger of dying.
Java has been in steady decline since about 2000. Is it dead?
C (according to Ohloh and less so TIOBE) has been in in rather sharp decline since 2006. Is it dead? In danger of dying?
You're full of nonsense.
According to the TIOBE graph, Ruby is almost exactly where it was in mid-2007. Using YOUR own source, Ohloh, in order to get a more visible scale, I graphed just Ruby. And guess what? Sure, it's a bit down from 2010, but it's about where it was in mid-2009, and way ABOVE where it was in 2006 and 2007. Again: if you can ignore some spikes in the JavaScript graph, I can ignore some short spikes in the Ruby graph.
I keep tellin' ya, man. You aren't reading the actual data properly. Go ahead and think I am insane if you want to. I'd be willing to bet I got better scores in my university statistics classes than you did.
After skimming the other posts here, I don't see where anybody else noticed that this came only a day or two after Ars Technica published a story about how statistics show a NEGATIVE correlation between violent video games and actual violence.
"It doesn't actually matter what the law says, if the bureaucrats, police, prosecutors, and judges have already agreed on how to interpret it."
I'm not arguing with you, but that is the completely wrong way to go about it.
"The first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statute is to discover the meaning of those who made it." -- James Wilson
"It's now one of the first things done in any lost person situation."
Then there should be no problem at all calling that "probable cause" and obtaining a warrant to do it. In practice, that can usually be done in less than an hour.
"If the warrant in your example was obtained based on a deliberate deception it would be invalid and the evidence from the search would not come in."
That is ONLY true if the deception is detected.
"Thus, no good faith exception for your dishonest detective. (Actually, he may be looking at a perjury prosecution.)"
But again, ONLY if the deception is detected. That is hardly something you can assume will happen.
"They can't get security camera tapes from a bank that was held up without a warrant? They can't gain access to information about who is driving your car without a warrant? I think it should be presumed there are lots of things a government can get access to without a warrant. "
I think you're looking at it the wrong way.
Consider land-line phones. The wires are publicly accessible. It takes no special equipment (I know this for a fact) in order to hook up to someone's phone line and listen to their conversations, even though those conversations are being transmitted through public property and through a third party. Without knowing who is calling whom, your location can't be tracked. But certainly, the phone company has a record that a call was made from that number (that location) at that time.
Now, for cell phones: in general, people use them (as phones) as they would land-line phones. They probably, and quite reasonably, expect a similar level of privacy. What real difference does it make whether it is "public airwaves" or "publicly accessible wires"?
In the judge's own words, the legal standard is "the amount of privacy a reasonable person would expect". I submit that the majority of the public expects their location information to be private. Whether YOU think that is reasonable is irrelevant. It is what the "average" person expects that counts.
"I claimed that ruby was in decline."
No, you claimed that Ruby was, in your own words, "... a dying little niche language" that nobody cared about. Your own figures show that to be false. Sure, maybe it's in very slightly less use than it was a few years ago, but it's hardly dying, and there is a rather large (in an absolute, not comparative sense) community of developers who do care about it.
"The claim was that ruby was declining in popularity."
Stop moving the goalposts. You did not. You claimed that it was dying and that nobody cared about it. Yet you have shown nothing of the sort.
"This was your original point: "According to the TIOBE Index, Ruby moved up on the list again this month.""
Which is pretty clearly true, according to TIOBE itself and your own references. And none of your extensive ranting refutes that.
"Which was intended to suggest that Ruby was not, in fact, dying."
I see. So you are reading minds now, too? Incredible.
"With Ruby clearly in decline..."
I did not dispute that Ruby was relatively flat or may have even declined (actually, according to your own charts, it's stayed pretty flat if you ignore a few short-term spikes). That was never my argument, and I clearly stated as much several posts ago. But that wasn't YOUR original argument. MY argument with you is that it isn't dying, and there are lots of people who care about it. But I see that I was just feeding a troll.
"The downward trend is clear as crystal."
No, it is not. By YOUR OWN data. If you look at the charts, it is roughly the same as it has been for several years, if you ignore some short-term spikes in the charts. Just as you proposed to do for JavaScript. If you can ignore some short-term spikes for JavaScript, then I can do the same for Ruby. You can't have that both ways.
There may still have been a very slight decline even if you ignore the spikes, but it is hardly significant.
"The data from RedMonk does not show a trend as it's a single snapshot."
Hah. But YOU tried to argue earlier that another shapshot was valid. I pointed that out quite a while ago. If you can do it, so can I. You can't have these things both ways, man.
"What a massive waste of this this has been."
I agree with that completely.
I would probably choose Russian or German.
Chinese, Hindi or the like are tempting, but a lot of work to make real inroads, and in case you hadn't noticed, there really isn't a big percentage of quality software coming to the Western world from those places. I'm not implying anything, just stating facts.
There IS a lot of quality software coming out of Germany and the Russian Federation, though.
"It's obvious to anyone capable of looking at the chart. I honestly don't see how you can continue to deny this, or why you'd even bother."
I'm not the one who is not paying attention here. I didn't deny this at all. In fact I explicitly acknowledged (go back and read again) that some of those sources showed Ruby's popularity over the last few years to be rather flat. It's right there in black and white. Why didn't you see that, or pay attention to it?
REPEAT: What I claimed was that Ruby was up LAST MONTH. None of your sources contradict that.
"TechCrunch is reporting on RedMonk's language ratings. I included that link as I thought that a simplified exposition would be helpful. I guess I was wrong..."
And once again: in my last post I mentioned that it was "RedMonk (via TechCrunch)..." but you apparently didn't see that either. Even so, proof that I understood who the source was is still there, in black and white.
"Again, all the data suggests that ruby is either flat or in decline. The TIOBE data shows that it's in decline and starting to flatten out (that's not growth) The data from RedMonk show Ruby to be flat (that's not growth). The data from Ohloh suggest that ruby is either flat or in slight decline. (They're NOT "dramatically different" at all. I'd say they agree remarkably well, especially considering that their methods for determining popularity are so dramatically different!)"
No, ALL the data do not. Once again, look at RedMonk's chart. REPEAT: it shows commits to Ruby projects to be above Perl and nearly level with C. This was data you referenced yourself.
I'm not making claims like that of my own, but very clearly, ALL the data do not show what you claim.
"If you read my post, I suggested that ruby's rise in popularity and subsequent decline was tied directly to RoR."
I don't care. My post was about Ruby, not Rails, and that is what you were replying to. Perhaps your point about Rails is significant, perhaps not, but showing that Rails had declined means nothing unless you can SHOW that there is a cause-effect link between that and the popularity of Ruby. You have not done so; you have merely made a bald, unsupported assertion.
" (Necessary, as using ruby by itself pulls in too much irrelevant data -- so much so that the chart runs nearly flat, as you would expect if you were searching for a common term like "emerald" or "gold" or "women".)"
That is the weirdest argument yet. As an analogy, that is rather like saying you are using Shelby Cobras as a proxy for all Fords, because searching just for Fords pulls in too many results.
"Why is this so important to you? Why do you even care that ruby is in decline?"
Who said I cared about that? The only reason I have been contradicting you is because you have been making ridiculous arguments and then claim to have actually demonstrated your point, when actually you have done nothing of the sort. You could have been arguing about ant farms, I don't care. You didn't even contradict my original point. So: why are YOU so adamant about it, to the point of making logically absurd arguments (Rails proxy, indeed)??
"I'm not surprised. You don't seem terribly interested in the data at all."
It depends on whose data you are looking at. But I repeat: at least two sources said Ruby was UP in popularity last month. That is the statement you seem to have been arguing with (either than or my claim that Ruby is not "niche")... I made no significant claims about its performance over a period of years. Yes, it does show rather flat, according to at least some of those datasets. But in others, no. Once again, according to your own reference: Redmonk (via TechCrunch) shows Ruby to be well ahead of Perl and almost even with C. Are YOU ignoring THAT data?
I suppose it depends on who you want to believe.
"You can't, however, argue the fact that the data presented shows Ruby to be flat or still in decline."
I most certainly can. Once again, Redmonk shows it well above Perl, and both TIOBE and one other reference of yours show it to be UP in popularity last month.
"I know that you like ruby, and that ruby is important to you."
That is completely irrelevant. In my opinion, looking at your own data, I think you are showing significant "confirmation bias".
" But I think TIOBE's ratings are usually a bit odd (Javascript and C# being so low is astounding), so I wouldn't necessarily use this low rating to prove my point either."
Having been in the industry for many years, I do not find their placement of JavaScript or C# odd at all.
.NET, for example, which is below Ruby in the list, is not a "niche" language either, since it can be used for creating general-purpose desktop apps or web pages or services, as the programmer desires. In fact there was a time when Visual Basic was the only game in town if you wanted to program for Windows in anything other than C, and at that time Microsoft was not publishing most of the C API anyway, so if you wanted to use that you were pretty much SOL. Not that Visual Basic has anywhere near the same relevance anymore, but it is hardly "niche".
However, if you want to look at other sources, see that other poster's comment with all the links in it. Many of those sources rank Ruby higher than the TIOBE Index does.
Regardless, I disagree. Visual Basic
In the same vein, Ruby is not limited to web pages via Rails or Sinatra. It is perfectly capable of general-purpose apps, and if you want UI you can use Wx or Qt or Shoes or MacRuby or... the list goes on. Compiled, or at least bytecode-compiled? JRuby, Rubinius, Parrot, or some of the other variants.
Heck, I did a very nice (at least in the customer's opinion) desktop app in MacRuby last year. Native Cocoa UI and everything. It is a native desktop OS X app in every way.
I see Midnight Modder is on the prowl again.
Would somebody care to explain to me why I got modded down for merely making factual statements about well-respected, freely available industry data?
As someone else pointed out (see the post with all the links), several other respected industry sources also say that Ruby is up in popularity, and some of them rank it as high as #5.
"You don't seem to understand that chart, the methodology, or statistics in general."
Apparently I understand them better than you do.
(1) Ohloh disagrees with TIOBE rather drastically. One or the other is wrong. Which one is hard to say, but TIOBE has a pretty good reputation in the industry.
(2) Your Python data shows a difference between 2011 and 2012. I clearly referred to differences between 2007 and 2012. In case you didn't know, there is a pretty big difference. The graph on that Pydatalog page also disagrees with both TIOBE and Ohloh. Which is correct?
(3) Your third link is about Rails, not Ruby. Again, there is a rather large difference. They are far from the same things.
(4) Your 4th reference shows, just as TIOBE (and I) stated, that Ruby is up in popularity this month. It also divides languages into "general purpose" and "scripting" languages, which is pretty much an obsolete designation these days. It appears that what they really mean is compiled versus interpreted. However, there are at least a couple of different ways to compile Ruby today (JRuby being just one example).
(5) Your 5th reference claims to show a graph of the TIOBE Index but the graph is actually nothing at all like the actual TIOBE index. Therefore I have to question the rest of their data as well. In addition, like some of the other references you gave, it doesn't show trends, which was the whole topic under discussion.
(6) As far as TechCrunch is concerned, NOBODY else comes even close to agreeing with their results. (But then, what they chart there is not at all the same as what the others are claiming to chart.) So who is right? However, TechCrunch DOES show Ruby right up there at the top, higher than Perl and very near C. And TechCrunch does support my assertion that Objective-C came from near the bottom to near the top in recent years.
Now, what was it you wanted to teach me about statistics?
"It was too old to make my earlier list (January 2012), but it's still quite relevant and informative. It should also help you make much better sense of the TIOBE data."
I disagree on several levels. Not only is it a year old (2011 data is all they claim), it does not agree with TIOBE at all.
Look at this comparison chart of many of the same languages as in the TIOBE Index. Just for one example, you can see that their results for Objective-C (which they should roughly agree upon, if they were going to agree on anything) are not even remotely similar.
Further, I repeat: Ruby has only been in popular use for a bit over 5 years now. Maybe 6 at a stretch. That makes it the youngest of the bunch.
I don't find that this informs me about the TIOBE Index at all. Rather, they simply disagree. At least one of them is way off.
"Yet the cash stopped Jane."
I am not claiming that they were not pressured by government. Just that it wasn't via National Security Letter.
"Last time I looked for jobs, it was full of Java and C#."
That's because during much of the last decade, Java and C# were among the languages in high demand. Which establishes a code base, which then has to be upgraded and maintained. And as you probably know, there is generally more work overall in upgrading and maintenance than there is in writing novel code.
However, that is no indication whatever that very much new is being done with Java or C#. Something to keep in mind.
During that time, languages like Python and (in just the last 5 years or so, which is a very brief time) Ruby have become the languages of choice for many people who are doing new work.
"Languages such as Java, C/C++, C#, PHP, and Visual Basic are FAR FAR FAR more commonly used than Ruby or Python. Those two are niche languages by almost anyone's definition."
Not so. Ruby continues to become more popular, and is already significantly ahead of JavaScript, .NET (except C#), LISP, etc. I don't see you can call anything in TIOBE's "A" list a "niche" product.
.NET (again, except for C# in particular) have gone down 2 or more notches during the same period.
Ruby has moved down a notch in the list since 2007, but that's just because Objective-C suddenly jumped into the A list, near the top. Other languages like PHP and
Slashdot is programmed in Perl. I would not consider that to be a recommendation.