RE: Declarative vs. procedural

I don't think the number matters (whatever the number happens to be).

Here's my argument:

Only the most trivial HTML applications can be developed without knowledge of JavaScript. If you don't know JavaScript, you can't build reasonable web apps, and you won't use anything but the most basic markup (and for that matter you won't use CSS either since that's even more mysterious than JavaScript, so your page is going to look rather amateur). Thus only the simplest possible cases need to be represented in markup, because only the simplest pages are markup-only. The rest should be left to the JavaScript API.

From: public-xg-htmlspeech-request@w3.org [mailto:public-xg-htmlspeech-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Charles Hemphill
Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2011 10:08 AM
To: 'Fergus Henderson'
Cc: public-xg-htmlspeech@w3.org
Subject: RE: Declarative vs. procedural

Hi Fergus,

Thanks for your clarification.  My wording could have been better.

According to the Web page "The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages."  There is probably a correlation between searches for a programming language and knowledge or desired knowledge of a programming language.  Of course, programmers can know (or want to know) more than one programming language.

No matter how you look at it, the 2% number for JavaScript relative the other languages seems low.  However, as previously discussed, it might be more informative to know the percentage of developers who know HTML relative to JavaScript (non-mutually exclusive).  It would be constructive to find numbers related to this.

Best regards,
Charles

From: public-xg-htmlspeech-request@w3.org [mailto:public-xg-htmlspeech-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Fergus Henderson
Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2011 4:56 AM
To: Charles Hemphill
Cc: public-xg-htmlspeech@w3.org
Subject: Re: Declarative vs. procedural

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

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