pop langs website ranking

[xahlee]

while doing my website's traffic report, i did some research on major
computer lang or tech website ranking. Here's the result ranked by
alexa.com (some non-lang tech sites are given just for comparison):

Php.net 550 (largely due to online doc and forum)
sun.com 900 (java doc and forum)
java.com 1122
slashdot.com 1223 (forum)
Mysql.com 1296 (online doc, forum)
gnu.org 7328 (massive docs, mailing list archives)
wolfram.com 9065 (online doc, mathworld etc)
Python.org 9410 (python doc and prob forums)
Perl.org 26067 (perl doc, forum)
paulgraham.com 48153 (lisp bigwig, but huh?)
Perl.com 49104
xahlee.org 80060 ↠Me!
haskell.org 118703
novig.com 130568 (lisp bigwig)
franz.com 292598
lispworks.com 377906 (common lisp doc)
Gigamonkeys.com 529551 (pop common lisp book)
schemers.org 880284

The list is not that surprising.

Many top ones are due to the popularity of the lang, but also because
their site hosts the lang's documentation and discussion forum (or
wiki,blogs). Hosting a web forum are likely to increase traffic some
10 or 100 fold.

Questions:

• paulgraham.com is unusually high. What's up with that?

• python.org at 9k seems also unusally high, compare that perl.org
with online doc and forum is only 26k. Python.org has mailing list
archives... maybe blogs too but am not sure it has forums... still the
gab seems surprising. Even perl is not much talked about these days,
but i'm guessing its market share is at least still 10 or 100 times of
python...

If any one so wishes, add entries to the above list.

Xah
(e-mail address removed)
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄

 

[greg]

Many top ones are due to the popularity of the lang, but also because
their site hosts the lang's documentation and discussion forum (or
wiki,blogs). Hosting a web forum are likely to increase traffic some
10 or 100 fold.

I think this goes to show that you can't really use the hit
rate of a language's web site as a measure of the language's
popularity. Lots of hits on the docs and forum might mean,
for example, that the language is very confusing and hard
to use, so people need to go looking for help a lot.

From that point of view, a *low* hit rate on the Python
web site could be seen as a good sign.

 

[Joost Diepenmaat]

Questions:

• paulgraham.com is unusually high. What's up with that?

He writes well. Also, if you look at the ranking, end of januari (Arc's
first release) was the highest ranking in 4 months. I'm surprised it
didn't score higher, actually.

• python.org at 9k seems also unusally high, compare that perl.org
with online doc and forum is only 26k. Python.org has mailing list
archives... maybe blogs too but am not sure it has forums... still the
gab seems surprising. Even perl is not much talked about these days,
but i'm guessing its market share is at least still 10 or 100 times of
python...

Perl has a remarkably fractured web-presence. Have you looked at
perl.org? The *only* thing that's really useful on that domain is
docs.perl.org.

Since python.org apparenly also contains an index to 3rd party
libraries, you may want to compare it to cpan.org (currently at 9,199)
for instance.