I like numbers. They can mean a lot of things.
Rather than continuing silly arguments over obfuscated and flawed measurements of “language popularity”, perhaps a better way of measuring the viability of a language or platform is to measure the freshness of its ecosystem.
LaPerla’s How Fresh is the CPAN? measures the upload dates of one of the world’s largest and most active repositories of free software. Of the 12,000 (or is it 14,000 now?) distributions on the CPAN, 25% have a most recent upload date of February 2008 or newer. Half have an upload date of 2007 or newer.
You don’t get those kinds of statistics by putting “Ruby Programming” into Google and pretending the results are meaningful.
So, we have a chart expressing CPAN's freshness - effectively, a single data point. Can this be compared to archives for other languages? Do we have any idea how the "freshness" of CPAN has been changing over time?
Without comparison, there is no meaning. Sure, CPAN is still growing more-or-less exponentially, but how does that contribute to any sort of "opinion"?
Python's Package Repository is growing by leaps and bounds. In fact, in our book, we have a whole chapter dedicated to teaching people how to get their packages into the Python Package Repository. With any luck the number of Python packages, libraries, scripts, will grow exponentially.
Sean,
It shows several things - CPAN is growing, the number of users using and contributing to CPAN is growing, you can combine this with perl job market and user group data and show that perl usage is growing.
Unlike TIOBE which is basically googlefight relabelled as usage/market metrics (and still get's it wrong - nobody has been able to replicate tiobes results with the same data and/or claimed techniques)