Computer Language Websites Popularity, Year 2008

While doing my website's traffic report (XahLee.org Web Traffic Report 2008), i did some research on major computer lang or tech website ranking. Here's a rough ranking of relative popularity of some computing sites:

The number under quantcast are estimated monthly unique visitors, in thousands, given by http://www.quantcast.com/ . Many are considering US only, and many data are missing.

The number under alexa ❮http://www.alexa.com/❯ is its 3-month average “reach”, defined as percentage of global internet users who visit the site.

In the above table, the last column list some of the services hosted by the site that has major impact on a site's traffic. The items is only of ones i'm aware of.

“doc” means it host language documentation, especially if it is the primary means its coder looks up doc while coding. “forum” means it hosts online discussion forum of some sort, it can also be blog or wiki. “lib” means it is a library archive. “news” means it serves as a news website. Typically, having any one of these services increases a site's traffic a few hundred times.

The list is not that surprising.

Many top ones are due to the popularity of the lang, but also because their site host the lang's documentation and discussion forum (or wiki,blogs). Hosting a web forum are likely to increase traffic some 100 fold. For example, php.net is most popular because it is one of the top 5 most popular language, but also because php.net holds its language documentation in a very convenient searchable way, and is the primary means how php coders read its doc when coding. (as opposed for example, perl or python, where probably most programers use the downloadable version of its documentation.) Similarly, for languages of Java, mysql, and Common Lisp, the doc online are their primary means of doc reading when coding.

When a website provides a forum, or blog, wiki, it also increases its traffic perhaps few hundred times, since these services gets people to participate in discussion, sometimes chatty. Some lang sites provides library archive as a service. Good example is perl's “cpan.org”, which makes the site one-stop place for coders to search existing code modules. When a website provides news service, it also increases its traffic a few times.

Webdev Sites Comparison

Math Sites Popularity

Here's a rough order of popularity of math sites.

Most of the site's data are accessed in 2008-04, but some sites may be added later. The purpose is to give a rough idea of their relative popularity. The 2 sites mostly agree in popularity ranking of the sites listed here, but a major differences is their report on “arm.org”.

Porn Sites

After the above rankings, one wonders what are the popularity of porn sites. Of course, there's youporn.com, which is within the world's top 50. But what about the typical porn image sites?

Political Sites

Ok, we've seen about the relative popularity of programing sites, math sites, web dev sites, and porn. What about political sites?

Some Social Networking sites

Some social bookmark sites.

Misc Sites