Faith Restored..

..in mankind that is. Well at least in developer-kind. After Friday's travails with that awful code, I was beginning to think it was impossible to pick up someone else's code and run with it. Well, today I was messing around with expression parsing and evaluation, and asked a question on stack overflow regarding the subject. One of the answers was from Barry Kelly, who works for Codegear on the compiler team. (maybe he IS the compiler team, I don't know) More often than not, it's Barry who answers my questions, I don't know why I don't just ask him for his phone number. Anyway, he pointed me in the direction of the Jedi Code Library and more specifically the JclExprEval unit. Apparently he wrote this a few years ago. It's everything that the code I was struggling with on Friday was not. It's will written, simple to read and understand, even though there is no documentation. Very easy to use, and should I ever need to debug it, I'm sure I'd have no problems. I can understand exactly what the developer had in mind, and can use it as is, or take away what I need with very little effort.

It's not always easy to describe what makes good code and what makes bad code. The thing is though, you always know good code from bad as soon as you see it. You also can tell so much about the developer who wrote it even though you've never met him or her.

The TIOBE Programming Index

I’m sure a lot of you (that is if anyone is reading this) are familiar with the TIOBE Programming Index. Basically, it’s an index which claims to gauge the popularity of programming languages according to how many times the term language programming (for Delphi that would be Delphi Programming) appears in various search engines. Some in the Delphi community are very excited to see that Delphi is at #8 snapping at the heels of C#. Take a look at Jim McKeeth’s post on the subject here. Now I’m a big fan of Jim’s blog and podcasts, but I can’t get as excited as he is about this.

First of all, does it seem realistic to you that Delphi is only 0.02% behind C#? I’d love it to be true, but all other evidence points to C# being much more popular than Delphi. Unrightly so in my opinion, but true nevertheless. I’m not saying that the TIOBE index is fixed or anything, but it must be fatally flawed somewhere.

So I thought, what could we use as an index of programming language popularity? Someone mentioned job-listings, which is probably a very good indication, but jobs vary geographically, and usually job-listings are specific to a country or region. So for example, looking at a US job listing site would not give you the true state of a particular language in the world. There has to be something more relevant.

Then I thought, how about StackOverflow.com. For those not familiar with StackOverflow.com, have a look at my last post. If we could count the number of questions for a given language, wouldn’t we get a fair idea of the current popularity of a language? If people are asking questions about a language, it’s because that language is being used. It has to be a better indication of current use than how many times a search engine can find some particular words.

So here it is. I’ve taken the top 20 languages from the TIOBE Index, and extracted the number of questions for that particular language from StackOverflow.com by looking at the corresponding tags for that language. I’ve had to use several tags for some of them. For example for Delphi, I took Delphi, Delphi2009, Delphi7 and Delphi-programming.  I may have missed a few tags, but I think I managed to get all the main ones. I also took only the top 20 and not all 50 languages in the list, as it seemed like too much hard work.

Position	TIOBE Position	Language	Stackoverflow Ratings
1	7	C#	26.381%
2	1	Java	15.933%
3	3	C++	12.126%
4	10	Javascript	9.239%
5	5	PHP	8.560%
6	6	Python	7.988%
7	11	Ruby	4.887%
8	2	C	4.764%
9	4	(Visual) Basic	4.438%
10	9	Perl	1.893%
11	8	Delphi	1.770%
12	18	Actionscript	1.449%
13	13	PL/SQL	0.262%
14	20	Lua	0.166%
15	17	COBOL	0.064%
16	14	SAS	0.027%
17	15	ABAP	0.027%
18	16	Pascal	0.027%
19	12	D	0.000%
20	19	Logo	0.000%

Why has C# gone from 4% to 26%? Well, StackOverflow.com may just be a magnet for .net developers. Actually, I think it was seeded from a .net questions and answers forum which used to live on the Joel On Software page. I still think C# should be closer to the top than the TIOBE index gives it credit for.

Why is Delphi so strong on the TIOBE index, and not so strong on StackOverflow.com? Perhaps the Delphi community just hasn’t found out about StackOverflow.com yet. Perhaps Delphi is easier to use, and you simply don’t have the same number of questions needing answers. Maybe other Delphi resources, be they web sites or books or whatever, are so good that we don’t need StackOverflow.com as much as say Java developers do. Or it could simply be the fact that there are more C# and Java developers out there than there are Delphi developers.

I think it is a whole lot more complicated than this, but the Stack Overflow Index just seems a whole lot closer to what I would have guessed the list to look like than the TIOBE index does. It could be improved. If we could create some algorithm that takes into accounts answers or perhaps even votes as well as questions, we may get a better picture of the current state of each language.

What do you think?

Stack Overflow

I was programming long before the internet, and long before Google. I sometimes wonder how we managed it before we had that great resource. I guess we read lots of books, and perhaps solved more problems ourselves. Or perhaps we just didn’t have as many problems as we do today. Whatever it is we used to do, I couldn’t do my job today without Google.

Well now we just may have something that in a few years time we’ll be wondering how we ever used to do our job without it.  Stackoverflow.com is that something. What is Stackoverflow.com? It’s a site where you can go and ask any programming question, and get an accurate answer pretty quickly. The genius of the site though, is how it gets developers to answer questions.

To get people to do anything, you either need to give them money, or you have to cater to their ego. Funnily enough, people will usually respond more to having their ego stoked, than if you were to wave money in front of their face. So back to that genius master stroke. Stackoverflow.com has a system of reputation and badges. You earn reputation for asking and answering questions. Other developers can vote your entries up or down depending on how good they think your effort was. That causes your reputation to go up and down. Reputation is like a video game score, and if you spend any time on Stackoverflow.com, it starts to feel like a game. The badges are awarded for attaining certain milestones such as giving an answer with 10 up votes (Nice Answer) or leaving 10 comments (Commentator) etc etc. I’m not so sure about the badges, but gaining reputation is addictive. The more reputation you gain, the more status you have, and the more status you have, the more administrator rights you gain over the site as a whole.

There are downsides to the site though. One is that it is very addictive. The other is that it can get depressing, as you begin to realize how little you really know. When you realize that there are over 40,000 questions,  and you can only answer a handful of them, it can get you down a bit.

So if you have a programming question you need answering, try out Stackoverflow.com.