🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <u191k7meja.fsf@njal.ml.csiro.au>,
Randall Gray <gray@njal.ml.csiro.au> wrote:
>propensity of the language towards bugginess.  Probably related to
>penetration of the language into university/college/school courses.

That's probably it...

In fact, I would take issue with those who declare that these are
worthless statistics unless you have more information about the
nature of postings about the languages listed.

Make a log-rank (X-axis) vs. log-count (Y-axis) plot using the
figures at the end of this posting. The points on a typical
plot of this kind will fall roughly on a straight line that
neccessarily goes from upper left to lower right. But in this
data you'll see that there is a sharp break in popularity
between the top four languages and the fifth.

This suggests that there is some overwhelming single factor
that makes the top four languages generate more discussion --
of whatever kind -- than the ones below them. My guess is that
this factor is the youthful weighting of Usenet demographics.
Pascal is mainly a student language, no? And C is the language
of choice for computer science students, no? And visual
Basic...I've heard of it, but it must be so new that our news
server had all of 12 messages in the comp.lang.visual
newsgroup, so I couldn't even get an idea of what it is!

  log rank  log count
    0.00    4.87
    0.30    4.85
    0.48    4.74
    0.60    4.64
    0.70    4.30
    0.78    4.21
    0.85    4.19
    0.90    4.18
    0.95    4.16
    1.00    4.12
    1.04    4.02
    1.08    4.02
    1.11    3.94
    1.15    3.86
    1.18    3.83
    1.20    3.78
    1.23    3.73
    1.26    3.73
    1.28    3.72
    1.30    3.63