More people should do things like this.

Following some links provided in a comment in my previous post led me to this study of the happiness of programmers using different languages from Dolores Labs. They surveyed Twitter posts that concerned various languages (e.g. "I sure love Fortran!" or "C is making me ANGRY!") and tallied the results to see what language garnered the most positive responses.

Here are the results:

The winner... PERL! I guess I can't leave my favorite language quite yet, eh?

Clearly, the results should be scrutinized and a formalized study would likely yield different results. Despite these criticisms, simple studies like this are fantastic. The results give clues as to what a broader, more rigorous study would uncover. The methodology provokes thought on ways to improve the study, the implications of the outcome, etc. And more importantly, the results are just neat. I am reminded of Mark Twain's famous quote on science, "One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."

Please explore the Dolores Labs site so I feel better about hot linking their results.

Shhhh... I'm having an affair!

Yep, you read it correctly- I'm cheating on my one true programming love, and I may wind up leaving her altogether. I've been a Perl monk for 3 years now, and it has been my go-to language for everything except scientific numerics and visualization. There's a good reason, too: it's easy to use, intuitive, and exceptionally powerful.

This is changing as I type, however. I've been enticed by Python, which promises to do everything that Perl can do. More importantly, it is becoming a staple in scientific programming and has powerful visualization modules available. The allure of my glue language becoming my EVERYTHING language is too much to resist. Imagine a CGI script that performs the calculation, generates the plots, and returns the requested material - and it's all in the same language! It is for reasons such as these that Python is climbing up the most used language charts.

My first task with Python is to re-create Dawkin's Weasel program, a straightforward goal (Oh, look - the good folks at New Mexico Science Watch are already on it!). I have a working version in Perl now with a CGI frontend. Let's see how quickly I can get up to speed in Python. But don't tell Perl yet; I don't think she could take it. If Python lives up to its billing, I'll let Perl down slowly.