Irrational Exuberance

You are writing a comment about Global Popularity of Programming Languages, here is a quick summary:

I used Google Insights to look at the global search popularity for a dozen programming languages. Although I wasn't inspired with any particularly valuable insights, its still fairly interesting to see the distributions.

You are responding to this comment written by Will Larson on August 17th 2008, 14:30.

Diana,

Your point about the leaders being countries with limited native language programming literature (or limited resources to buy it) is an interesting one, but I don't think it explains the results. The way that I believe (and there is ample room for mistakes in my understanding) the data is being normalized should negate that effect. Actually, I believe the data normalization addresses all of your comments. Let me explain how I believe the normalization is occurring.

Lets say that India has 7000 searches for Java, 5000 searches for Python, and 3000 searches for Objective C. Then Cuba might have 100 searches for Java, 300 searches for Python, and 10 searches for Objective C. Then each language has a ratio of the total searches in that category calculated. In India, Java has 7000/(7000+5000+3000) or 7/15 percent of the overall search volume. In Cuba, Java has 100/(100+300+10) or 10/31 percent of the search volume.

Thus comparing those two countries, Java would have a score of 1.0, and Cuba would have a score of (10/31) / (7/15) -> ~0.69.

Again, this understanding may be entirely off base, but it is the basis of my thoughts about the search results thus far.

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