Re: [xml-dev] SGML complexity

[<juanrgonzaleza@canonicalscience.com>]

Eric van der Vlist said:
> Le mercredi 06 septembre 2006 à 03:10 -0700,
> juanrgonzaleza@canonicalscience.com a écrit :
>> Mukul Gandhi said:
>> > Sorry I don't know about the languages I cited, so I cannot comment
>> about their popularity.
>> >
>> > I have seen XML (and XSLT) being used heavily in application
>> > integration domain, so I can say XSLT is very very popular. And
>> application integration is definitely a very big market. Also these
>> days, XSLT is used a lot in conjunction with XSL-FO. XSLT these days
>> is also used a lot in Web Services and SOA.
>>
>> I do not doubt that XSLT is used. But if an Amazon query returns 4712
>> results for books on Javascript, 1362 for XSLT, and 11065 for PHP...
>
> Hmmm... PHP is a popular server side scripting language indeed but
> Javascript has become the de facto standard for client side scripting.
> The number of web pages using Javascript is probably much bigger than
> the number of pages served through PHP and the number of people having
> ever written or adapted a script in Javascript is probably much bigger
> than he number of people having ever written or adapted a script in PHP
> as well.
>
> I think that such figures should be taken literally and only mean that
> the Amazon database knows more books about PHP than about Javascript
> than about XSLT and shouldn't be extrapolated to popularity.

Sure that figures _only_ assure us that there exist more books on PHP or
JS than XSLT on Amazon database.

But it is an usual practice in many fields sizing the activity/popularity
in a field from the quantity of stuff is being written about. E.g. more
papers and books devoted to string theory means that string theory -as
attempt to quantize gravity- may be more popular than LQG or
triangulations. Of course, this offers us just an orientation; it is not
law.

> Furthermore, "popularity" involves a notion of "preference" and should
> be clearly defined before we try to throw figures (the figures you give
> seem to be more relevant to "visibility" than "popularity").

<blockquote>
The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the
popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month.
The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers,
courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN,
and Yahoo! are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TPC index
is not about the best programming language or the language in which most
lines of code have been written.
</blockquote>

[http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm]

> Eric
>
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> Eric van der Vlist       http://xmlfr.org            http://dyomedea.com
> (ISO) RELAX NG   ISBN:0-596-00421-4 http://oreilly.com/catalog/relax
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Juan R.

Center for CANONICAL |SCIENCE)