Buzz

2011-05-29T19:41:00.001-07:00

test blog

2011-05-29T05:12:00.000-07:00

such a tortuous route taken

2011-05-03T00:44:00.000-07:00

For app developers iOS is still the platform for sales

2011-04-04T18:57:00.000-07:00

3 months in..comparison between iOS, Android and Windows Phone sales | lesmond.net

The Birthday Skeleton

2011-04-04T05:19:00.000-07:00

via K Ko

The Birthday Skeleton - lol Comic | Funny Pictures and Funny Videos | Fun Stuffs | Funstoo: Just For Serious Fun Blog

Logo for Apple Computer Co. from 1976.

2011-04-04T02:38:00.000-07:00

The image shows Sir Isaac Newton sitting under the apocryphal apple tree.

XKCD Radiation Dos Chart

2011-03-21T23:07:00.000-07:00

I'm kind of surprised that I hasn't seen this posted a hundred times already in Buzz.

So I'm posting it now.

2011-03-01T19:42:00.000-08:00

The story of Terry Gilliam's battle with Sid Sheinberg at Universal to get Brazil released.

My Buzz Wall of Awesome

2011-02-24T18:19:00.000-08:00

A wall of the buzzy goodness that I find in my Buzz every day.

Joshua is the new John.

2011-02-14T19:58:00.000-08:00

John is a middle-aged name. Who would consider naming their child John in this day and age? They would be more inclined to name them either Joshua or Jacob. Here is the history of boy names in English speaking countries over the past 800 years.

The graphs below show the ranking order of the top twenty names over time. While ranking doesn't convey a sense of relative population sizes, names like many things follow a power law distribution. During most of the period, at least up until 1800, 25% of the male population had the top ranked name, 50% had one of the top three names and over 80% had one of the top ten names.

The period up until 1300 is one of considerable movement as many of the names which had been common before the Norman Conquest (names such as Radulf, Herbert, Hugo and Asketill) were replaced with Norman ones. After that time, however, a period of remarkable stability sets in with the top three spots being occupied by John, William, Thomas for well over five hundred years.

The Renaissance and Reformation saw the addition of new names to the top twenty, most notably the biblical name Joseph and the reassertion of the royal name Henry. Interregnum and Restoration greatly improved the fortunes of the royal name Charles while the biblical (and royal) name James made steady ground throughout the entire period.

The Industrial Revolution around the turn of the nineteenth century unquestionably produced a great deal of social dislocation and upheaval but shifts in name usage really only started to be felt towards the end of that century. While the top ten names varied little for most of this period, there was a significant decline in dominance of all of the major names. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the top ten names represented more than 80% of all male names but by 1900, this figure had dropped to less than 50%. It would continue to drop during the course of the twentieth century.

World War II saw the beginning of a trend in which all of the traditional names went into steep decline. Already by the late nineteenth century, the name Thomas had lost its place in the top three to James but John and William continued to do well right up until the end of the 1960s. They were joined by the newly resurgent Robert and Richard but the name Henry had by then completely fallen out of the top twenty.

By 1970, however, with the notable exceptions of Joseph and William, all of these names had begun falling from favour.

The twentieth century also saw the addition of several new names to the top twenty. Donald (originally a surname) was an early favourite but it quickly faded after the war. Baby Boomers made the biblical names Michael, Matthew, Daniel and David popular. The saint name Christopher also became popular at this time.

By the year 1970, the percentage of mindshare owned by the top ten had dropped still further to around 30% and the top name was now borne by only 5% of the male population.

It was in this context that yet another batch of names surged to the fore. Once again these were dominated by the names of biblical figures and saints but the old practice of adopting surnames as first names (originally as a way of preserving the mother's maiden name) finally started to produce a significant number of top twenty names.

Two observations about the current top twenty names. Firstly, many of them are already in decline. With an increase in the rate of new name invention inevitably comes an increase in name extinction and by all indications, at least half of them will not be dominant in the next decade. Secondly, they are not representative of the top names in non-American English speaking countries.

The data that I used for the post-1880 names came from the U.S. Social Security Administration and while naming trends in Britain and the Australia have followed pretty much the same pattern as in the US, the post-1970 name choices are different and reflect different recent social histories and different constellations of soap opera characters. Britain's top ten includes names like Jack, Thomas, Oliver and Benjamin while the Australian top ten contains names like Lachlan, Ethan and Liam.

The biblical name Joshua is looking like a keeper in all three countries though.

To Tate

Happy Birthday
love from
Aunty Lou, Uncle Graeme,
Hayden, Kelda,
Carrick and Barret
XXXXXX 000000

-- inscription found on a second-hand kid's book,

dated 1986

2011-02-10T04:28:00.000-08:00

"Main street (blue)" by Gilles Tran (2003)

The Evolution of Numbers

2011-02-07T05:04:00.000-08:00

I wrote this originally back in 2003.

Counting in groups of ten, a practice evidently suggested by the number of fingers on two hands has been practiced by many cultures for millennia . But the act of writing them down using a system of place notation system which can expand without limit is only comparatively recent innovation.

Here then is the story of 1 to 9 and of 0 and 10.

In the last few centuries before the Christian era, by our reckoning, India emerged from a dark age that had endured since the fall of the Indus valley civilization fifteen hundred years earlier. It was at this time that the written word started to reappear, especially in the form of edicts and inscriptions left by Ashok , the great emperor of the Mauryan Empire. These words were written in a script known as Brahmi and in amongst its letters we find symbols to express numeric quantities which look like this:

Even in this embryonic form it is possible to see the outlines of their future shapes, but it is important to realise that they did not as yet comprise a fully developed place-notation system, something which requires the symbol zero. Instead Brahmi used special symbols to represent 10, 20, 30, 100, 1000 and so on. The inclusion of zero or "nothing" as a numeral occurred some time around 600 AD and it transformed the Indian counting system into one that allowed numbers to expand without end. It could achieve this remarkable feat economically and without cumbersome notation or need to invent more and more symbols, a feature that all previous systems lacked. In computer parlance, the new positional system was really scalable .

As a slight diversion it is worth looking at how the Greeks represented numbers at the time. Many of us are familiar with Roman numerals but what system did the Greeks use? All of the famous classical mathematicians were Greeks, right?

The Sand Reckoner

Greek mathematical notation was not positional; it utilized many symbols and was cumbersome to work with.

The "M" is a myriad , and represents 10,000. The Greek work is murious (uncountable, pl. murioi ). The Romans converted to this to myriad .

It has been argued that the reason why this innovation occurred in India rather than the West was largely because of a peculiarly Indian fascination with astronomically huge numbers .

The traditional Indian cosmology states that the universe undergoes cyclic periods of birth, development and decay, lasting 4.32×109 years, each of these periods is called a Kalpa or ``day of Brahma''. During each Kalpa the universe develops by natural means and processes, and by natural means and processes it decays; the destruction of the universe is as certain as the death of a mouse (and equally important). Each Kalpa is divided into 1000 ``great ages'', and each great age into 4 ages; during each age humankind deteriorates gradually (the present age will terminate in 426,902 years). These is no final purpose towards which the universe moves, there is no progress, only endless repetition. We do not know how the universe began, perhaps Brahma laid it as an egg and hatched it; perhaps it is but an error or a joke of the Maker.

This description of the universe is remarkable for the enormous numbers it uses. The currently accepted age of the universe is about 1018 seconds and this corresponds to about 7 Kalpas+335 great ages. A unique feature of Indian cosmology is that no other ancient cosmology manipulates such time periods.

In the Surya Siddanta it is stated that the stars revolved around the cosmic mountain Meru at whose summit dwell the gods. The Earth is a sphere divided into four continents. the planets move by the action of a cosmic wind and, in fact, the Vedic conception of nature attributes all motion to such a wind. It was noted that the planets do not move in perfect circles and this was attributed to ``weather forms'' whose hands were tied to the planets by ``cords of wind''

The Brahmi script went through a continuous evolution, spawning numerous variants, the most important of which was the Devanagari (or sometimes simply Nagari) script. With Devanagari numerals, the 1 was rotated by 90 degrees and had developed a serif-like loop at the top. The 2 and 3 took on their familiar shapes due to shortcuts taken by scribes, who chose to link the parallel bars rather than lifting their pens.

Knowledge of Indian numerals spread quickly to the West. As early as 662, Severus Sebokht, a Nestorian bishop who lived in Keneshra on the Euphrates river, wrote:

I will omit all discussion of the science of the Indians, ... , of their subtle discoveries in astronomy, discoveries that are more ingenious than those of the Greeks and the Babylonians, and of their valuable methods of calculation which surpass description. I wish only to say that this computation is done by means of nine signs. If those who believe, because they speak Greek, that they have arrived at the limits of science, would read the Indian texts, they would be convinced, even if a little late in the day, that there are others who know something of value.

However, it had to wait until the Arab conquests before the Indian numerals began to be adopted widely and even then only very gradually. In the 11th century, the Muslim mathematician and astronomer al-Biruni referring to Indian numerals wrote:

Whilst we use letters for calculation according to their numerical value, the Indians do not use letters at all for arithmetic. And just as the shape of the letters that they use for writing is different in different regions of their country, so the numerical symbols vary.

While the Devanagari numerals already look quite familiar to Western eyes, in the process of adoption by the Arabs led to a stylistic split between East and West. The Western Arabs of Morocco and Andalusia continued to use numerals that quite closely resembled their Devanagari forebears, even as late as the 14th century:

However in the East, the numerals evolved quite rapidly in a different direction.

This example comes from a work dating from 969.

But only 120 years later they looked like this.

And this is what they look like today in modern Arabic

On closer examination, it can be seen that the numbers 2, 3 and 7 have become rotated by 90 degrees but the other figures have not. One explanation for this is that Arab scribes who write from right to left do so by turning the paper 90 degrees so that the right hand edge is at the top. Lines are then laid down by writing them from top to bottom in columns. It's thought that some scribes less familiar with the Indian signs failed to rotate them correctly.

From Spain and North Africa, the Devanagari numerals passed practically without modification to Europe and the rest is, so to speak, history...

Margarita philosophica by Gregor Reisch (early 16th century)
Pythagoras thinks: Hmm, me thinks this referee dame is unfairly prejudiced.

But while migration of the Indian numerals westward was to have a dramatic effect on later developments, it would be wrong to think that this was the only direction of their movement.The first millennium AD was India's Golden Age, a time when India's power and prestige were at their zenith and its culture was being transmitted to all of its neighbours, both East and West.

This was the time of Greater India .

Buddha statue on the upper terrace of Borobudur Stupa, Java, Indonesia

So here then is a brief survey of some of the other paths taken.

Tibetan

Burmese

Cham

Western (Cambodia)

Eastern (Vietnam)

Khmer

Thai

Javanese

Further examples can be found at the excellent Omniglot .

The Fine Folk I Follow

2010-11-27T02:26:00.000-08:00

To Our American Buzzers: Happy Thanksgiving

2010-11-25T15:12:00.000-08:00

And do pass on our regards to your Indian friends. Eat, drink and be merry.

Tangentially:

The Spaniards appeared to be much delighted, they seized upon the gold like monkeys, their faces flushed. For clearly their thirst for gold was insatiable; they starved for it; they lusted for it; they wanted to stuff themselves with it as if they were pigs. They went about fingering, handling the streamers of gold, passing them back and forth, grabbing them one to the other babbling, talking gibberish among themselves.

— Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, General History of the Things of New Spain

Indians pouring molten gold down the throat of a Spaniard
(while cooking a bunch of others)

Propaganda piece by Theodor de Bry, Great Voyages, Part IV, 1594

TIOBE Programming Community Index for November 2010

2010-11-08T21:18:00.001-08:00

November Headline: First cracks appear for Objective-C

After having been the rising star for a long time now, Objective-C dropped considerably last month. The ratings for Objective-C are 0.5% less if compared to October. Other remarkable changes in the TIOBE index this month are the first time entrance of Lego's Mindstorms programming language NXT-G in the top 20, the sudden decline of Google's Go (out of the top 20) and the lowest position for Visual Basic ever since the start of the index.

The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, Yahoo!, Wikipedia and YouTube are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about thebest programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system. The definition of the TIOBE index can be found here.

Position Nov 2010	Position Nov 2009	Programming Language	Ratings Nov 2010	Delta Nov 2009	Status
1	1	Java	18.509%	+0.14%	A
2	2	C	16.717%	-0.60%	A
3	4	C++	9.497%	-0.50%	A
4	3	PHP	7.813%	-2.36%	A
5	6	C#	5.706%	+0.36%	A
6	7	Python	5.679%	+1.01%	A
7	5	(Visual) Basic	5.470%	-2.70%	A
8	13	Objective-C	3.191%	+2.30%	A
9	8	Perl	2.472%	-1.02%	A
10	10	Ruby	1.907%	-0.50%	A
11	9	JavaScript	1.664%	-1.25%	A
12	11	Delphi	1.638%	-0.49%	A
13	17	Lisp	1.087%	+0.47%	A
14	23	Transact-SQL	0.793%	+0.38%	A
15	15	Pascal	0.784%	+0.13%	A
16	29	Ada	0.695%	+0.39%	B
17	36	NXT-G	0.682%	+0.45%	B
18	14	SAS	0.669%	-0.15%	B
19	30	RPG (OS/400)	0.656%	+0.37%	B
20	12	PL/SQL	0.655%	-0.25%	B

Long term trends

The long term trends for the top 10 programming languages can be found in the line diagram below.

Other programming languages

The complete top 50 of programming languages is listed below. This overview is published unofficially, because it could be the case that we missed a language. If you have the impression there is a programming language lacking, please notify us at tpci@tiobe.com.

Position	Programming Language	Ratings
21	MATLAB	0.636%
22	Lua	0.612%
23	ABAP	0.597%
24	Object Pascal	0.556%
25	Go	0.548%
26	Scheme	0.508%
27	Fortran	0.477%
28	Tcl	0.423%
29	D	0.414%
30	COBOL	0.405%
31	Logo	0.397%
32	CL (OS/400)	0.371%
33	APL	0.366%
34	JavaFX Script	0.366%
35	R	0.365%
36	JScript.NET	0.330%
37	C shell	0.327%
38	ActionScript	0.326%
39	Scratch	0.325%
40	IDL	0.325%
41	Visual Basic .NET	0.323%
42	Haskell	0.312%
43	Alice	0.311%
44	Prolog	0.300%
45	Erlang	0.267%
46	Smalltalk	0.266%
47	Forth	0.256%
48	Awk	0.238%
49	ML	0.237%
50	Scala	0.235%

The Next 50 Programming Languages

The following list of languages denotes #51 to #100. Since the differences are relatively small, the programming languages are only listed (in alphabetical order).

ABC, Algol, Applescript, Bash, bc, Beta, C++/CLI, CFML, cg, Clean, Clipper, Cobra, cT, Curl, Dylan, Eiffel, Euphoria, F#, Factor, Groovy, Icon, Io, J, LabVIEW, LabWindows/CVI, MAD, MAX/MSP, Modula-2, Modula-3, MUMPS, Natural, Oberon, Objective Caml, Occam, Oz, PL/I, Postscript, PowerShell, Q, REALbasic, S, SIGNAL, SPSS, Squirrel, Standard ML, Verilog, VHDL, XBase, XSLT, Z shell

Very Long Term History

To see the bigger picture, please find the positions of the top 10 programming languages from 5, 15 and 25 years ago in the table below.

Programming Language	Position Nov 2010	Position Nov 2005	Position Nov 1995	Position Nov 1985
Java	1	1	-	-
C	2	2	1	1
C++	3	3	2	8
PHP	4	4	-	-
C#	5	7	-	-
Python	6	8	10	-
(Visual) Basic	7	5	3	4
Objective-C	8	42	-	-
Perl	9	6	5	-
Ruby	10	24	-	-
Lisp	13	14	12	2
Ada	16	17	6	3

Programming Language Hall of Fame

The hall of fame listing all "Programming Language of the Year" award winners is shown below. The award is given to the programming language that has the highest rise in ratings in a year.

Year	Winner
2009	Go
2008	C
2007	Python
2006	Ruby
2005	Java
2004	PHP
2003	C++

Categories of Programming Languages

In the tables below some long term trends are listed about categories of languages. Object-oriented statically typed languages are most popular now for more than 4 years.

Category	Ratings Nov 2010	Delta Nov 2009
Object-Oriented Languages	56.7%	+2.4%
Procedural Languages	38.0%	-3.5%
Functional Languages	3.6%	+0.7%
Logical Languages	1.7%	+0.4%

Category	Ratings Nov 2010	Delta Nov 2009
Statically Typed Languages	63.1%	+4.1%
Dynamically Typed Languages	36.9%	-4.1%

TIOBE Software: Tiobe Index