When defining the categories and selecting the projects there was a hot and long debate on whether to include Programming Languages and how to compare and rate the individual projects. For example should a programming language be benchmarked against the generic needs and requirements you would list or against the usual domain the language is used in? PHP for example is mostly used for web applications, so should only this domain be looked at? Many people in the expert group voted for not including programming languages at all. Others including me claimed that programming languages are actually one of the most important categories in Open Source software over all and can’t be excluded. We finally decided to include them but there was still the discussion on how to compare them and to decide whether for example PHP is really higher in “enterprise readiness” than Perl for example. Well, after long discussions we finalized the ratings and are following the answer of our users with high interest. From a popularity point of view we seem to have made the right choices with the exception of Ruby that seems to be very popular with our users and even beats Java in popularity. From a user rating point of view Ruby and Perl are more positively rated by our users than what we proposed. But this is just the current assessment and gathered feedback at this point in time. We can expect many more debates and discussions over the coming months. Stay tuned!

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This entry was posted by Bruno von Rotz on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Open Source projects, User feedback. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.