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The eigenvector of “Why we moved from language X to language Y”

erikbern.com

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Re: The eigenvector of “Why we moved from language X to language Y”

#171

Post by raesene9 »

To me it's unsurprising that people move from "thing that was popular a while ago" to "newer thing".

Generally when a language/framework/toolset first hits, it looks magical and fixes loads of problems people are currently experiencing.

It's own crop of problems has yet to emerge (generally these only emerge once a sufficiently large number of projects have been using it for a sufficient length of time).

So at the moment Go is the new thing, and it's surplanting the older new things... come back in 3-4 years and it'll likely be on the losing end to something else.

Re: The eigenvector of “Why we moved from language X to language Y”

#172

Post by psiclops »

ArneBab wrote: post #146

This looks pretty interesting. Most striking to me is that Go is taking from other 'target' languages. You can see the 5x5 block of the other strongest target languages giving to Go, but not taking from it. To make what the Eigenvector says explicit: Top 5 giving to Go directly: C, Python, Java, Ruby, Scala Top 5 giving to C: C#, R, Java', C++, Fortran Top 5 giving to Python: C', Perl, Java', C#, C++ Top 5 giving to…

Rob Pike has a great blog post that talks about the creation of Go and expected adoption vs where many of them ended up migrating from

https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti...

Re: The eigenvector of “Why we moved from language X to language Y”

#173

Post by anvildoc »

hasklel wrote: post #97

10000 vocal webdevs make a blogpost about moving from Node/Python/Ruby to Go because their app is slow as shit and the JVM isn't trendy enough for them. Also I wonder if I'm reading this correctly but are there actually people moving from Cassandra/DynamoDB to Mongo??

there is clearly a mistake in the database graph ... that it must be inverted... because also no one is moving from mariadb to mysql

Re: The eigenvector of “Why we moved from language X to language Y”

#175

Post by PeterisP »

erikbern wrote: post #166
omaranto wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That bit about the stationary distribution not changing if you add a diagonal matrix sounds completely wrong to me. Let me see if I understand what you mean. Given a matrix M with non-negative entries (and no row of just zeros), let S(M) denote the stochastic matrix you get by normalizing each row of M. You are saying that if M is any matrix and D is a diagonal matrix with non-negative entries then S(M) and S(M+D) ha…

Right. Both the matrix S and the identity matrix will project the stationary distribution onto itself. So any linear combination of them will project the stationary distribution onto itself. Let me know if I'm saying something really stupid

[[1 1] [1 1]] and [[10 1] [1 1]] will have different stationary distributions, the values on the diagonal will likely be different than a multiple of the identity matrix.

Re: The eigenvector of “Why we moved from language X to language Y”

#176

Post by thehardsphere »

mi100hael wrote: post #169
thehardsphere wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this exact reaction to the graphs that also showed: 1. Movement from Postgres to MySQL 2. Movement from Mariadb to MySQL (and NOT the other way around?!?) 3. Movement from PHP to Java (I remember the sort of people leaving Java for PHP 10 years ago, and I don't think they'd go back, or that PHP people would pick Java as their choice to move to) I think maybe he has the axes labeled wrong?

MySQL is actually seeing a resurgence as people realize that ACID is valuable and performance is just fine for 99.9% of use-cases. And Java is seeing a bit of a resurgence as well as people get fed up with shitty PHP and other dynamically typed languages. Java has some frameworks like Dropwizard and Spring Boot that make it not as terrible anymore.

> MySQL is actually seeing a resurgence as people realize that ACID is valuable and performance is just fine for 99.9% of use-cases.

That wouldn't explain why people jump from the database with better ACID (Postgres) to the one with generally worse ACID (MySQL). Or why people would move from the open source non-Oracle fork (MariaDB) to the Oracle-acquired original project that everyone forked away from (MySQL).

> And Java...

Oh, I agree. Java is awesome these days. I'm just making a disparaging blanket generalization about the people who jumped to shitty PHP to begin with.

Re: The eigenvector of “Why we moved from language X to language Y”

#177

Post by agency »

erikbern wrote: post #166
omaranto wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That bit about the stationary distribution not changing if you add a diagonal matrix sounds completely wrong to me. Let me see if I understand what you mean. Given a matrix M with non-negative entries (and no row of just zeros), let S(M) denote the stochastic matrix you get by normalizing each row of M. You are saying that if M is any matrix and D is a diagonal matrix with non-negative entries then S(M) and S(M+D) ha…

Right. Both the matrix S and the identity matrix will project the stationary distribution onto itself. So any linear combination of them will project the stationary distribution onto itself. Let me know if I'm saying something really stupid

Doesn't that mean you're assuming the number of people staying with any language X is the same regardless of X?

Re: The eigenvector of “Why we moved from language X to language Y”

#178

Post by foobun »

MrQuincle wrote: post #151
omaranto wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That bit about the stationary distribution not changing if you add a diagonal matrix sounds completely wrong to me. Let me see if I understand what you mean. Given a matrix M with non-negative entries (and no row of just zeros), let S(M) denote the stochastic matrix you get by normalizing each row of M. You are saying that if M is any matrix and D is a diagonal matrix with non-negative entries then S(M) and S(M+D) ha…

Moreover data is collected over the entire history. A matrix is a linear operator from time step T_i to T_i+1. By conflating all historical observations into one matrix it definitely is not an ordinary transition matrix. That apart from the fact that it is questionable that it can be represented by an operator that is finite and linear. It's more likely a stochastic process (infinite matrix) with births and deaths. I…

That was my immediate thought upon reading. A little more accuracy in the description would be helpful. This should be presented as: "If this aggregated data reflected a constant across time, then we can see where language usage would end up in the 'long run distribution'." But the jump matrix shown here will change with time. Most likely, if search results could be binned up by time period, the time dependence of the distribution represented by the eigenvector(s) would be somewhat interesting to watch, even if not remotely predictive. Could animate that or contour plot it.... exercise for the author... :)

Re: The eigenvector of “Why we moved from language X to language Y”

#179

Post by laughfactory »

azinman2 wrote: post #152

Oi. Another person who thinks the number of search results returned is a real number that means something.... the fact that it gives even plausible results is impressive as the number is made up by googles servers.

Made up? Can you explain? I ask because I'm professionally working on a project which uses those results and I've often wondered about their validity. I know there are...Issues with them in various ways, but what are you aware of?

Re: The eigenvector of “Why we moved from language X to language Y”

#180

Post by kem »

DocSavage wrote: post #167
thaumasiotes wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whether Go succeeds in the sense this data suggests An interesting thing about this methodology is that it is extremely sensitive to the age of a language. It's possible to switch from an old language to a new language, but not the other way around -- so if you happen to do your measurements after a language has had some uptake but before it's been around for long enough that people have built significant projects…

The sorted stochastic matrix shows that C contradicts your assumption that it's not possible to switch from a new language to an old one. Or, at least, it shows that portions of new language code are occasionally rewritten in C.

What's missing from the matrix is "no language" language or null language. That is, a column and row that represents people who start projects from scratch in a given language.

I agree that the analysis makes it abundantly clear people move to older languages, but the question is what new projects are started in, and how many projects represent new versus transitioned projects.

This analysis is interesting, and gives a rough idea of what people are moving from and to when they decide to do that, but not necessarily popularity.

What the author is indexing in the end isn't really predicted overall language use, it's predicted transition target frequency.

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