As programmers, you've no doubt seen, and perhaps joined in, the many arguments about language popularity. Whether language A is on the decline, language B is in ascension, etc. While the arguments are often interesting and insightful (sans flaming), they usually tend to be anecdotal, i.e., "I've had this experience, which makes me believe X."

A recent discussion on this site (665102) got me to thinking about more substantial data on the matter. I know there is the TIOBE index, but I thought it would be interesting and maybe useful to approach the problem a little differently. So I created LUI, the "Language Usage Indicators" page.

http://lui.arbingersys.com

My idea is to be as transparent as possible, and to include as many "indicators" as are useful. My assumption is that a wider range of indicators from more, rather than fewer sources provides a better perspective.

As to "transparency", I built a simple and small framework (in Perl!) for generating the indicators. It can be downloaded from the page above. I also make the "raw" data available in CSV format, so if you don't want to mess with code, you could still access the data and do something with it some other way.

My plan is to run this at some interval -- I'm thinking monthly, but I'd be interested in hearing why other intervals might be better -- and create an archive of the previous index pages and raw data.

LUI is still a ways off from complete. For instance, I want to add indicators for koders.com, freshmeat, and the top 100 projects from Sourceforge. I also think a jobs indicator would be useful (and I think I remember seeing a post somewhere on Perlmonks for that... ). I'd be interested in hearing what the Monks think.