I started using Open Source languages as a hobby about 10 years ago, but I became involved in them with my work ("Graham ... you know some Perl, don't you? .....") and these days I'm fortunate to earn my living from what was just a hobby.
Is the predominant use of Open Source languages the hobby / personal user, or the business user? How could we possibly find any statistics / measures / indicators?
I've noticed a consistent pattern in our web logs from this site - our traffic is double on a Monday - to - Friday compared to our Saturday and Sunday traffic; I can read an "ls" report of daily log files like a calendar to tell me days of the week. And the difference is even more significant as we have a noticeable "crawler" traffic from search engines indexing our pages which averages out to a constant 7-day-a-week, 24-hour-a-day spread.
Search engine terms give a further clue - that's words entered into known search engines that bring visitors to our site:
For
Tomcat for every visitor on Sunday, we got 2.94 on Monday
For
Perl, the ratio is 1 : 2.73
For
Tcl, it is 2.63
and those are pretty significant figures; I've looked around at some of our other subjects too - and the ratio for
PHP is 2.09, for
Java is 2.05, and for
Python is 1.88; slightly lower figures but still significant.
Overall sample size for the detailed statistics was 15000 search terms entered on Sunday and Monday last for hits on our
www.wellho.net web site.
(written 2004-09-15, updated 2006-06-05)
Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles
A651 - Web Application Deployment - Tomcat Overview [498] Why is Tomcat called Tomcat? - (2005-11-17)
[576] Why run two different web servers - (2006-01-25)
[659] Web Application Components - (2006-03-28)
[1265] Apache, Tomcat, Jakarta, httpd, web server - what are they? - (2007-07-13)
[1771] More HowTo diagrams - MySQL, Tomcat and Java - (2008-08-24)
[1941] Server - Service - Engine - Host, Tomcat - (2008-12-14)
[2016] Apache httpd and Apache Tomcat miscellany - (2009-01-30)
[2077] Why put Apache httpd in front of Apache Tomcat - (2009-03-12)
[2186] An FAQ on the Apache httpd and Apache Tomcat web servers, and on using them together - (2009-05-17)
[2753] You do not just fly - that is just part of the journey - (2010-05-06)
[3997] Servlet v JSP (Java Server Page). What is the difference? - (2013-02-06)
[4434] Public training courses - upcoming dates - (2015-02-21)
A100 - Web Application Deployment - The Components of a Web-Based Solution [34] Linux / LAMP course - (2004-08-31)
[166] Acronyms - (2005-01-02)
[367] Ajax - (2005-07-03)
[433] FTP - how to make the right transfers - (2005-09-01)
[442] How far away is that server? - (2005-09-10)
[510] Dynamic Web presence - next generation web site - (2005-11-29)
[673] Helicopter views and tartans - (2006-04-06)
[924] The LAMP Cookbook - Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP / Perl - (2006-11-13)
[1176] A pu that got me into trouble - (2007-05-04)
[1198] From Web to Web 2 - (2007-05-21)
[1496] PHP / Web 2 logging - (2008-01-06)
[2099] Should I maintain the programming code on my own website? - (2009-03-23)
[2896] LAMP - Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP - install, configure, administer - (2010-07-30)
[3891] The components of an Apache httpd / Tomcat / MySQL stack and what each does - (2012-10-13)
Some other Articles
Drive the driveInternational awarenessGym and swimming - Melksham Blue PoolCurrent cost in your local currencyBusiness is the predominant user of Tomcat, Perl and TclPHP - onwards and upwardsEffective fundraisingNear and far securityCGI v mod_perlSerious subject