Re: maintaining skills

ron_adams@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

>I KNEW this would happen!   "KILL THE MESSENGER!"
>
>Being mad at the messenger or the message is not going to solve anything. 
>
>Tiobe/Developer.com posted along with these stats, the following 
>disclaimer, 
>
>-*Disclaimer*-
<snip>


Ron:

I don't think "Kill the messenger" is a valid interpretation of responses 
unless "the messenger" is chosen to be the figures and graphs from Tiobe. The 
figures are nearly indecipherable at seemingly important points.

Look at the latest few data points on the 'Long term trends' graph at the < 
http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index/index.htm > for C and Java. The horizontal 
axis looks to be in increments of a quarter of a year, so the idea that the 
final data points are for March 2005 seems reasonable. Yet, the graph points 
show a decrease for C and an increase for Java between January-March while the 
table implies an increase for C and a decrease for Java. At least, I _think_ 
that's what the table implies -- perhaps 'implies' isn't a strong enough word.

How does one make sense of the figures?

One graph segment that really made me wonder was at and just after March '04. 
Man, something really seemed to jigger the world of searches for programming 
languages in that period, and it doesn't seem to have settled since.

Anyway, not "kill the messenger" but "what does this mean???"

I believe messengers ought to be commended for providing info such as this. The 
simple fact that these 'data' have been collected for those years shows that 
_somebody_ believes they have value. But what?

Tom Liotta


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