erikbern / eigenstuff Goto Github PK

Hi, I love the overall approach of this work and how you have written it up as a blog post and posted the code on GitHub.

Your treatment sets the diagonal elements of the transition matrix to zero. You got questions about this assumption and replied in the blog comments, but I think you are still missing an important aspect of this.

The (omitted) diagonal components of the transition matrix give the probability of sticking with that language. In a given row, the sum of the non-diagonal components gives the total probability of leaving that language. The point that I want to make is the the total rate at which people are leaving individual languages are not the same. Thus, the omitted diagonal components are not simply a scale times the identity matrix.

The impact that this has on the conclusions is likely dramatic.

The row-wise normalizations you have done are wrt the total number of transitions in that row. For a popular language such as C/C++/Java/Python, those raw numbers represent an extremely small percentage of the overall language population. Thus for those rows, the omitted normalized diagonal element would be $1-\epsilon$, with the other elements of the row summing to a very small number $\epsilon$.

Likewise, for less popular languages such as Go (I am not picking on Go here, I love it as language!) the quoted transition counts would represent a more significant fraction of the existing population. This would cause the diagonal component to be significantly smaller than 1.0 after normalization.

I want to emphasize that I love the application of this type of model to these questions. It would be great to see it applied in a context where both the existing population of users (diagonal components) and all of the transitions where available. Cheers, Brian.

The most used verb in switching to programming languages is the verb "port" or porting from language x to y.

I think i can give this a try and let you know.

But overall your work is just amazing. Thanks.

Hi,

If with the term node you mean javascript on backend side maybe under this term I think you need to include node.js, node js and typescript (that of course can be both front-end and backed side).

Sounds very strange to me that there are no migrations javascript or typescript due the fact that is on the top10 of stack overflow survey 2020.

Obviously node.js is a framework and not a language, but in this case you need at least consider javascript and typescript

It's probably an OK search term for most cases, but the fact that sample code is mostly written in Swift now and there are a ton of legacy projects means people will want to convert from Swift to Objective C not because they are switching, but because they need to backport new ideas.

Not important, but the Swift->ObjectiveC cell in the matrix didn't seem right.

Hey Erik, how about uploading cache.tsv file to data.world (create the dataset). I think it matches the built-in facilities nicely there.