Ryan Leavengood wrote:
> On 11/29/05, Isaac Gouy <igouy / yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> > Do you have any evidence for
> > 1) How much Smalltalk caught on
> > 2) How much Ruby has caught on?
>
> Well if you ask the average grunt programmer born and raised on C++ or
> Java about Smalltalk or Ruby he or she will probably just say "What?"
> But I think there is a greater chance that person has heard of Ruby,
> especially because of all the noise about Rails lately.
>
> While certainly not scientific, a Google search for "smalltalk"
> returns about 4.8 million results, whereas a search for "ruby" returns
> 41.8 million. Now you might scoff and say "well ruby is also a
> precious gem." OK, then let's try "ruby language": 7.1 million
> results. Using "smalltalk language" returns 2.1 million. As another
> comparison, "java language" returns 70 million results, "c++ language"
> returns 26.1 million and "python language" returns 22.2 million.
>
> Overall a Google search seems to be a pretty good indicator of
> language popularity, so Ruby is 3.5 times more popular than Smalltalk.
>
> Ryan

You might have more luck searching for VisualWorks, VisualAge,
Resilient,...

If we took your evidence at face value then we might say Ruby has 3.5
times more mentions than Smalltalk, a decade after the peak of
Smalltalk popularity - being mentioned is good, but it isn't the same
as being used and only the barest first step towards "catching on" :-)