Never trust a statistics you didn't forge yourself

[Marc van Woerkom]

Hello Michael!

>>As an example that bad rankings don't cause any stirr 
>>take 
>>e.g. the big language shootout, which is discussed on 
>>this 
>>list occassionaly.
>
>And the reason for this could be, that they do not 
>comment on the results at 
>all ? 

The (fictitious) analogon of the bit that offended me 
would be something like:

   "Consider the good results for Erlang with a grain of 
salt, because an influential member of the Erlang mailing 
asked everyone to improve the benchmarks"

.. and that had not happened sofar.

I want to stress that I like to see Erlang in your paper, 
but with real numbers, be they bad or good, otherwise what 
is such a survey good for? I certainly don't want to force 
it. 

It is not that this stuff is in desperate need of 
publicity. As a rough estimation of publicity I just 
searched the ACM Digital Library.
Of 171,143 indexed items, we get following hits:

   Erlang      584
   MPI        1641
   PVM         670
   Beowulf     226
   Java      12592
   Haskell     955
   OCaml        88
   Fortran   12588

That's not bad.

Regards,
Marc