Re: Declarative vs. procedural

On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 6:04 AM, Charles Hemphill <charles@everspeech.com>wrote:

> Hi Everyone,
>
> I mentioned some numbers from an article that I noticed last week:
> http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html.  The top
> 2
> programming languages are known by about 17% of the programmers (each).
>

That is *not* what the 17% number on the web page that you cite means.

The Tiobe index<http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/tpci_definition.htm>doesn't
track what proportion of programmers know each language.
It essentially just tracks the number of web search hits for "<foo>
programming" for each language <foo>,
and normalizes this so that the top 50 languages account for 100%.
That's a completely different measure.

Many programmers -- and *all* the good ones -- know more than one
programming language.


> JavaScript is known by about 2% of programmers.  This might be surprising
>

Or it might be just plain wrong.


> given the billions of Web pages out there.


> Having a JavaScript API is fine, but keep in mind that there are many HTML
> developers who know little to no JavaScript.  It's good to have a
> declarative markup option for those who specialize in markup.  The
> JavaScript API should then fit with and extend the declarative markup
> option.   That's easier to do now than to retrofit later.
>
> Best regards,
> Charles
>
>
>
>


-- 
Fergus Henderson <fergus@google.com>

"Defend the user, exclude no one, and create magic." -- Eric Schmidt.