parallel programming survey results

[Ulf Wiger (AL/EAB)]

Daniel Luna wrote:
>
> On the other hand, this whole survey seems to be bogus. If 
> you remove the 130 Erlang answers you remove more than half 
> of the total answers (256).

No, the actual number of people who claimed to be using 
Erlang was 38. 130 was a weighted number, which included
how often the language is used for programming parallel
systems. The average weight for the erlang users was 
3.4 (3 = "often", 4 = "for every parallel application")
This is a fairly high number, obviously, if we compare:

  OCaml   3.0
  .NET    2.7
  UPC     2.0
  C       1.9
  Python  1.8
  Shell   1.7
  Prolog  1.5 
  C++     1.3
  Fortran 1.3
  Lisp    0.8
  Java    0.6

It could be read as "those who know Erlang use it 
whenever they design parallel applications."

BTW, I don't know if 38 respondents is a "relatively
high" number for erlang, since just about everyone
who uses it, uses it for parallel applications in
some sense.

In the survey, it is formulated thus:
"Noteworthy is the fact that Erlang is one of the very 
few programming languages for which parallelism is an
integral part of the language, and it therefore has 
high submissions for both questions one and two."

One can of course note that while the survey form
allowed ticking in simultaneous use of C, C++, Fortran,
and Java, it encouraged only one mention each of a 
functional, logical or other programming language.
I don't know how much this can be expected to have 
skewed the results in favour of the explicitly named
languages.

/Ulf W