Rewrites
July 17th, 2009 Posted in programming, weirdTonight I searched for the phrase “rewrote it in X” where X was any of the following languages. The languages are listed in the order that they came to mind. The number of hits Google showed is listed. I’m honestly not sure what to make of this. What do you think is going on here?
Rewrote it in…
| Ruby | 213 |
| Python | 277 |
| Java | 60,500 |
| C++ | 316 |
| Scheme | 1 |
| Smalltalk | 2 |
| C# | 138 |
| Haskell | 6 |
| Erlang | 3 |
| OCaml | 2 |
| VB | 29,500 |
| C | 624 |
| Javascript | 10 |
| Prolog | 0 |
| COBOL | 3 |
| awk | 5 |
| Ratfor | 1 |
| Lisp | 5 |
What is completely tripping me out is that these numbers changed while I was composing this post. And something especially odd is going on with the Java numbers, because now Google is only finding 292 hits for “rewrote it in Java” instead of 60k hits like it did 40 minutes ago. I would chalk this up to an error on my part, except the hits for VB are still the same at about 29,500.
4 Responses to “Rewrites”
By Markus on Jul 18, 2009
If I search for “re-wrote it in Java” I get various big numbers and a “Did you mean” link, as opposed to the lower (and seemingly more consistent) number I get searching for “rewrote it in Java.” I suspect the variations come from getting different cluster members–IIRC those big numbers are SWAGS based on probability tables and not actual counts.
– MarkusQ
By Markus on Jul 18, 2009
P.S. I see a fence post error–comment number one is ‘No responses to “Rewrites”‘.
By matt on Jul 18, 2009
Yeah, I figured I was hitting a different node or group in their cloud. I know looking at Google hits isn’t precision science but I *was* hoping it would be good enough for reckoning. Maybe not!
By matt on Jul 18, 2009
Oh, and the off-by-one error is courtesy of the theme I adulterated into what you see here. The blog look and feel have been on a low priority, but it’s been long enough I really should fix that. And a bunch of other annoying stuff here!