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On popularity

Andrew Smith pointed out that according to Indeed.com, Python is about a factor of 3 times more popular than Ruby and is maintaining that lead as both graphs trend upwards.

I'd like to add just a couple things that I noticed.

One is that, like Django, Rails is a term with multiple meanings, and the Ruby framework only accounts for a small fraction of jobs that Indeed pulls up for that term. (I'm impressed that Indeed allows you to nest arbitrarily complex boolean expressions here...)

Another is that although Python looks pretty popular vs Ruby or Lisp, it's a good thing that popularity doesn't really reflect how good a language is, because ye olde statically compiled languages are still seven to twenty times more popular than python. Even PHP and Perl are more popular. (Although the trend on Perl is definitely down-sloping, for which we can all give thanks. C++ also has a noticable downward trend.)

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