Language popularity is dependent on support resources like forums, groups and blogs. When we analyze the popularity of a language, we need to compare the support resources for each language.
Everyone of us, from a newbie to an experienced hack, have run into road blocks time and again and have turned to these support resources for solutions and pointers. The support structure for each language plays a critical role in making it easy to adopt a language and to increase its popularity with an increasing user base.
So, how does Perl, Php, Python and Ruby compare in terms of support resources?
The first comparison we make is the general term visibility in each search engine.
Term Visibility
This gives an idea as to the number of sites out there that at least mentions the language. Granted, this is a very poor way to compare the number of sites devoted to each language but due to a lack of my imagination, I am going to use this for a very gross comparison. The TIOBE Programming index uses +"<language> programming" as a way to calculate the popularity of a language. Instead of using the phrase, we will use <language> AND programming as I think this is a less restrictive way of finding sites devoted to a language and is good at eliminating noise (as much as possible).
| Sites from Each Search Engine in Thousands
| | Google | Yahoo | MSN | Normalized | | PHP | 104 | 66.2 | 105 | 1 | | Perl | 48.2 | 30.5 | 42.5 | 0.46 | | Python | 44.1 | 24.1 | 15.5 | 0.39 | | Ruby | 33.1 | 22.5 | 23.2 | 0.32 |
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The normalized column is a weighted normalization using search engine market share, Google: 63%, Yahoo 32% and Msn 5%.
For every 100 sites for PHP, there are 46 sites for Perl, 39 sites for Python and 32 sites for Ruby.
Usergroups that Meet in Person
Usergroups that meet in person provides an excellent opportunity for anyone interested in that language to learn from the experts. The number of usergroups also indicate the motivation and dedication of the user base. This is a definite indicator of the popularity of that language. We compared the officially listed usergroups that is located in North America (US, Canada and Mexico). We used the number of user groups listed in PerlMongers, Python.org, RubyGarden.org and PhpUserGroups.org .
 | User Group Comparison
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My 2 cents: Come on Python enthusiasts, you need to do better if you need to grow Python's popularity.
Most Popular Forums
We compared the membership numbers in the most popular online forums to get an idea of the size of the user base for each of the language. The membership is of course not restricted to the U.S and like the term visibility is a rough indicator of the size of the user base.
Popular Perl forums
Popular Php Forums
Popular Python Forums
| comp.lang.python | 11433 registered members
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| tek-tips | 2046
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Popular Ruby Forums
Usenet group, comp.lang is the common forum across Perl, Php, Python and Ruby, so it makes sense to compare the memberships of the usenet group.
This is part of the "What Makes a Programming Language Popular" series where we compare Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby. See
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