> Recently I read quip somewhere that if some plane had crashed after a
> Haskell(?) conference, it would have wiped out most of the language
> community.
>
> This made me wonder just how big the communities flocking around various
> functional languages really are. If I go only by my own perception
> (availability heuristic, anyone?), the Haskell community must be huge,
> all that talk about monads and stuff, certainly larger than the C#
> community which I barely notice. Now, that can't be true, I obviously
> need a reality check.
>
> So, are there any somewhat objective numbers, maybe based on conference
> attendance, book sales, or job offers? It would be interesting, to have
> an idea of the relative sizes of, say, Erlang, Haskell, (S)ML, OCaml,
> Scheme. I'm not looking for a contest where quality equates to
> popularity, contrariwise, for some this might even be an eye-opener and
> prompt them to move on to a less crowded language.
>
> Michael ...

>On Aug 18, 12:13 pm, Michael Schuerig wrote:

>> Recently I read quip somewhere that if some plane had crashed after a
>> Haskell(?) conference, it would have wiped out most of the...

> Recently I read quip somewhere that if some plane had crashed after a
> Haskell(?) conference, it would have wiped out most of the language
> community.

> This made me wonder just how big the communities flocking around various
> functional languages really are. If I go only by my own perception
> (availability heuristic, anyone?), the Haskell community must be huge,
> all that talk about monads and stuff, certainly larger than the C#
> community which I barely notice. Now, that can't be true, I obviously
> need a reality check.
>
> So, are there any somewhat objective numbers, maybe based on conference
> attendance, book sales, or job offers? It would be interesting, to have
> an idea of the relative sizes of, say, Erlang, Haskell, (S)ML, OCaml,
> Scheme. I'm not looking for a contest where quality equates to
> popularity, contrariwise, for some this might even be an eye-opener and
> prompt them to move on to a less crowded language.

>
> One of the best objective measurements I have found is the Debian and Ubuntu
> package popularity contest results. This is an automated measurement of the
> number of users who have packages (such as a specific compiler) installed.
> However, it is obviously only an accurate reflection of usage on Linux and
> not on Windows.

> Jon Harrop skrev:

>> One of the best objective measurements I have found is the Debian and
>> Ubuntu package popularity contest results. This is an automated
>> measurement of the number of users who have packages (such as a specific
>> compiler) installed. However, it is obviously only an accurate reflection
>> of usage on Linux and not on Windows.

>
> At least as regards Erlang, I wouldn't put too much stock in this
> statistic (even though I thought a surprisingly high number seem to
> use packages). For various reasons, partly historical, most Erlang
> developers install from source. That goes for the applications too.

> You also mentioned the huge amount of talk about Haskell. You may wish to
> distinguish between people who talk the talk and people who walk the walk.
> I recently gathered statistics about this and found that open source
> software written in OCaml is 30x more successful than Haskell in terms of
> users garnered per programmer:
>
> http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/haskells-virginity.html
>

> In essence, a tiny number of very vocal Haskell proponents try to make it
> look as if Haskell has many real programmers and success stories but the
> reality is quite the opposite.

>> You also mentioned the huge amount of talk about Haskell. You may wish to
>> distinguish between people who talk the talk and people who walk the
>> walk. I recently gathered statistics about this and found that open
>> source software written in OCaml is 30x more successful than Haskell in
>> terms of users garnered per programmer:
>>
>> http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/haskells-virginity.html

>
> Your conclusions contrast sharply with the results on Ohloh, which is
> also a flawed benchmark.
>
> Haskell
> http://www.ohloh.net/languages/38
>
> OCaml:
> http://www.ohloh.net/languages/61

> Haskell programmers will almost all have either hugs or ghc6 or both
> installed, so there are between 6,606 and 9,794 of them.

> On the contrary, the evidence you just cited shows that hundreds of Haskell
> packages are being created and the evidence I cited shows that all but two
> (Darcs and HPodder) remain unused.
>
> Surely the only logical explanation is that these Haskell packages are
> failures, presumably because they are useless.

> They are certainly imperfect but they are among the best indicators I have
> found. Google Trends is another good one. The Windows platform is the
> obvious omission.