Re: [Caml-list] Estimating the size of the ocaml community

[Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com>]

I was just reading this presentation and stumbled upon some figures it 
contains of the number of freshmeat projects written in different languages:

http://www.uclan.ac.uk/facs/destech/gradschool/autumnschool/thu11built-karlin2.pdf

According to this, just over a year ago (09/2003), OCaml was the 31st most 
popular language with 22 projects.

Checking freshmeat now, OCaml is the 24th most popular language with 52 
projects. Here's the full {language, projects} list:

{{C, 7066}, {Java, 3769}, {C++, 3523}, {Perl, 3300}, {PHP, 2947}, {Python, 
    1763}, {Unix Shell, 721}, {Tcl, 421}, {JavaScript, 409}, {SQL, 
    405}, {Objective C, 260}, {Other, 221}, {Assembly, 220}, {Ruby, 219}, {C#,
     155}, {Other Scripting Engines, 125}, {Scheme, 111}, {Lisp, 81}, {PL/SQL,
     78}, {Delphi, 74}, {Fortran, 62}, {Ada, 56}, {Common Lisp, 54}, {OCaml, 
    52}, {Emacs-Lisp, 51}, {Pascal, 48}, {Haskell, 48}, {Awk, 46}, {Zope, 
    41}, {Smalltalk, 33}, {ASP, 33}, {Visual Basic, 31}, {Basic, 30}, {Eiffel,
     28}, {ML, 27}, {YACC, 24}, {Forth, 23}, {Cold Fusion, 
    20}, {Object Pascal, 19}, {Prolog, 18}, {Erlang, 18}, {Pike, 11}, {Lua, 
    11}, {Rexx, 10}, {Modula, 9}, {Groovy, 5}, {Logo, 4}, {Euphoria, 4}, {APL,
     3}, {PROGRESS, 2}, {Pliant, 2}, {Dylan, 2}, {XBasic, 1}, {Simula, 
    1}, {REALbasic, 1}, {Euler, 1}}

I also computed the fractional increase in the number of projects for each 
language to determine how rapidly languages have been adopted over the past 
year. C# is 1st and OCaml is 2nd:

{{C#, 3.44444}, {OCaml, 2.36364}, {Objective C, 1.91176}, {Common Lisp, 
    1.86207}, {JavaScript, 1.74043}, {Haskell, 1.71429}, {Ruby, 
    1.71094}, {Java, 1.57304}, {Emacs-Lisp, 1.54545}, {Delphi, 1.48}, {Ada, 
    1.47368}, {Python, 1.47162}, {PHP, 1.43058}, {C++, 1.41999}, {Scheme, 
    1.40506}, {SQL, 1.38225}, {Fortran, 1.37778}, {Unix Shell, 
    1.30144}, {Other Scripting Engines, {}}, {PL/SQL, 1.27869}, {C, 
    1.28077}, {ASP, 1.26923}, {Pascal, 1.26316}, {Assembly, 1.24294}, {Lisp, 
    1.22727}, {Zope, 1.20588}, {Perl, 1.19392}, {Tcl, 1.17927}, {Awk, 
    1.15}, {Other, 0.840304}}

Considering that C# is pushed by Microsoft, Objective C is pushed by Apple and 
LISP is pushed by Thomas Fischbacher ;-), I think this is very impressive.

I've also checked the number of unique posters to caml-list per month, which 
has continued to rise exponentially since 1992, currently weighs in at 300 
and is set to hit 1,000 in the year 2008.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://ffconsultancy.com