44
\$\begingroup\$

I feel like we may have enough data on this site to meaningfully break programming languages into classes.

What I mean by classes is akin to Go's ranking system:

If a player can win 90% of even games against a 2 kyu player, the AGA believes he or she is 1.33 ranks higher, the EGF believes (s)he is 2.42 ranks higher, and the IGS believes (s)he is more than 3 ranks higher.

We may need to break the competition down into tags (e.g., a puzzle may have a different ranking system than a puzzle (cough, Bubblegum).

The use case for this would be to more reasonably compare your success - If a Python answer beats one in J, the author should be pretty proud. If Pyth beats Java by just a bit, the Java author should also be pretty happy with themselves (or the Pyth author ashamed).

Would anyone be interested in this endeavor?

\$\endgroup\$
15
  • 1
    \$\begingroup\$ It's an interesting idea, but I think most of us have already formed subjective opinions; for example, I consider Ruby, Python, Perl, etc. in a higher and fairly well-defined "class" than Java, Rust, etc. Nevertheless, if you do attempt something like this, I'd be very curious to see the results! (I have a language-detection script floating around somewhere, in a Github Gist I think, that could come in handy.) \$\endgroup\$
    – Doorknob
    Mar 25, 2016 at 16:58
  • 8
    \$\begingroup\$ I think there are two (broad) schools of thought on what "success" means here in golf terms. One is getting the overall shortest by choosing the appropriate language for each task (choosing your tools). The other is finding the shortest given a certain tool (language). While I like to beat up on C# with Java as much as the next guy, it's not a true comparison across all golfs, because the real difference is (mainly) which builtins are there and how they're named. So I'm not sure I see how ranking each would help people in either school of thought judge their success. \$\endgroup\$
    – Geobits
    Mar 25, 2016 at 17:03
  • \$\begingroup\$ To echo what Geobits said -- defining the tasks that make up the metric is going to be extremely difficult and subject to much debate. Many languages are very close on the Hello World challenge, simply because "Hello, World!" (with or without the trailing ") is a valid program in dozens of languages. Or ones where a particular language has a clear built-in that leapfrogs it ahead of where it would "normally" sit. Challenges like that would skew the numbers incorrectly. Not that I'm against the idea, it just needs a lot of rigor. \$\endgroup\$
    – AdmBorkBork
    Mar 25, 2016 at 17:51
  • \$\begingroup\$ @TimmyD Yes - and I have no statistical background, so I'd like to get someone with more stats knowledge on board before pursuing it. \$\endgroup\$
    – Not that Charles
    Mar 25, 2016 at 17:53
  • 7
    \$\begingroup\$ I honestly have no clue why this has been consistently downvoted so far. While the commenters have a point that it's going to be hard to figure out how to get the most meaningful data, I'm pretty sure that across all our code golfs we can find significant trends easily enough. It may be hard to determine with any certainty whether C# or Java is better for golfing, but I'm sure we can detect some fuzzy ranking. +1, I like the idea of trying to mine some data from our content. \$\endgroup\$
    – Martin Ender
    Mar 25, 2016 at 18:59
  • 4
    \$\begingroup\$ @MartinBüttner, it's probably suspicion about motives. I'm fighting the temptation to downvote by reminding myself that we should assume good faith, but the context of previous meta questions by people who were pushing handicap systems does inevitably affect the subtext I read into this one. \$\endgroup\$
    – Peter Taylor
    Mar 25, 2016 at 19:20
  • 4
    \$\begingroup\$ @PeterTaylor That's a good point, but I'd rather downvote the post making use of such a handicap system than an attempt to gather some interesting data from our challenges. \$\endgroup\$
    – Martin Ender
    Mar 25, 2016 at 19:28
  • 1
    \$\begingroup\$ @PeterTaylor I am not very active in meta and haven't read that thread. I don't have motives aside from what is presented. \$\endgroup\$
    – Not that Charles
    Mar 25, 2016 at 20:01
  • 14
    \$\begingroup\$ @PeterTaylor Also, for the record, I think a handicap system is a terrible idea. \$\endgroup\$
    – Not that Charles
    Mar 25, 2016 at 20:01
  • \$\begingroup\$ Another reason is that it would be nice to see a language competition - some sort of aggregate of all the work folks have done to abuse languages. Where does Perl beat Ruby? Does D beat C? Where does TI-BASIC beat Mathematica? \$\endgroup\$
    – Not that Charles
    Mar 25, 2016 at 20:38
  • 1
    \$\begingroup\$ I downvoted because, not only would this be very difficult and many people would disagree with the classes due to the subjectivity involved, but defining language classes opens the door to attempts to impose handicaps, which I am strongly against. \$\endgroup\$
    – user45941
    Mar 25, 2016 at 21:59
  • \$\begingroup\$ We already have some data in response to this code challenge. \$\endgroup\$
    – xnor
    Mar 25, 2016 at 23:13
  • 10
    \$\begingroup\$ I don't see why people are so opposed to this. Everyone knows that some languages are golfier are other. Most golfers already have a vague sense of the ordering, and surely actual statistics are better. \$\endgroup\$
    – xnor
    Mar 26, 2016 at 4:29
  • 5
    \$\begingroup\$ Seems like a fine idea to me. While it shouldn't be considered definitive, it'll probably be interesting. \$\endgroup\$
    – isaacg
    Mar 26, 2016 at 7:27
  • \$\begingroup\$ @xnor Like I mentioned before, I don't think it's a worthwhile endeavor. The lines are too fuzzy to be able to create clear-cut classes, and there are lots of issues that skew the data such that the classes would not be meaningful (as I commented on Alex's answer). \$\endgroup\$
    – user45941
    Mar 29, 2016 at 1:18

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
36
\$\begingroup\$

Elo ratings, treating pairs of submissions as games.

I'm using the Elo system here.

Essentially, the solution is find the best solutions in each language to each challenge, and then treat each pair of such solutions as a match between those two languages, with the winner being the shorter submission.

Languages with less than 10 entries are discarded, and languages have a starting rating of 1000.

One drawback of this system is that ELO favors more recent entries. To compensate, I used a relatively low K value, which makes updates slower, and so old answer count for more.

The data is from this query, courtesy of Alex A. To run the code, put the two code blocks below in files with the names given, put the query csv file in ratings.csv, and run parse.py

New results, with bug fix

In the old version of the code, there were two bugs:

  • Answers with hyperlinks in the header were not counted.

  • Languages with numbers in the name were not counted.

I have fixed both bugs. In doing so, the code now considers differently named versions of a language (e.g. Python 2.7 and Python 2) to be different languages. I don't think this is a major problem - allowing languages with numbers in the name is much more important.

Also, since many more answers are correctly parsed, more languages meet the threshold to be displayed.

August 2023 Results:

Vyxal:                            2053
Thunno 2:                         2044
Nekomata:                         2034
Jelly:                            2028
Nibbles:                          1997
Husk:                             1926
SOGL V0.12:                       1916
Neim:                             1896
05AB1E:                           1893
Stax:                             1847
MathGolf:                         1837
Pyke:                             1831
MATL:                             1825
Canvas:                           1798
Japt v2.0a0:                      1789
Japt:                             1784
Pyth:                             1780
Ohm:                              1735
Gaia:                             1706
Ohm v2:                           1704
Pyt:                              1703
Brachylog:                        1702
Actually:                         1700
Convex:                           1647
Jolf:                             1628
Arn:                              1622
Seriously:                        1575
APL:                              1560
Pushy:                            1546
Burlesque:                        1531
Dyalog APL:                       1529
J:                                1508
Keg:                              1503
CJam:                             1497
V:                                1483
Pip:                              1476
cQuents:                          1470
BQN:                              1444
TeaScript:                        1439
Charcoal:                         1414
Haskell + hgl:                    1391
x86 Machine Code:                 1372
k:                                1372
𝔼𝕊𝕄𝕚𝕟:                            1366
K4:                               1334
Attache:                          1332
x86 32:                           1326
stacked:                          1313
Ly:                               1310
Braingolf:                        1284
Add++:                            1283
x86:                              1278
Golfscript:                       1273
Labyrinth:                        1261
q/kdb+:                           1233
Aceto:                            1218
APL+WIN:                          1208
Jellyfish:                        1184
Raku:                             1178
PARI/GP:                          1170
TI:                               1167
Q:                                1167
MY:                               1166
DC:                               1129
Regex:                            1127
Julia 0.6:                        1110
Runic Enchantments:               1105
Octave:                           1100
Proton:                           1085
Cubix:                            1077
Wolfram Language:                 1068
Factor:                           1061
Retina:                           1059
Matlab/Octave:                    1058
Perl:                             1053
QBIC:                             1050
Fourier:                          1046
R:                                1044
Bubblegum:                        1043
bash+coreutils:                   1042
Ruby:                             1031
Mathematica:                      1028
Julia 1.0:                        1026
Vim:                              1024
Curry:                            1015
Julia:                            1013
Octave / Matlab:                  1012
MAWP:                             1011
JavaScript:                       1011
Cheddar:                          1010
jq:                               983
Arturo:                           983
Hexagony:                         963
Perl 5:                           949
Retina 0.8.2:                     947
Röda:                             944
befunge:                          943
CoffeeScript:                     919
Perl 6:                           912
Alice:                            908
GNU sed:                          902
Postscript:                       896
jq 1.5:                           889
sed:                              878
Funky:                            870
PowerShell:                       862
Groovy:                           856
Matlab:                           850
Python 3.8:                       842
CHIP:                             841
Python:                           835
Python 3.5:                       830
Clojure:                          830
Bash:                             828
Python 2:                         825
Google Sheets:                    824
Elixir:                           815
Zsh:                              814
Haskell:                          803
Python 3:                         802
Knight:                           793
PowerShell Core:                  790
Cubically:                        790
Desmos:                           788
AWK:                              786
SmileBASIC:                       773
Lexurgy:                          767
ES6:                              766
QBasic:                           763
Python 3.6:                       756
Java:                             732
PHP:                              731
Processing:                       724
PowerShell v2+:                   712
Excel:                            711
Excel VBA:                        707
MMIX:                             695
Forth:                            679
JavaScript ES6:                   676
Java 8:                           669
Prolog:                           667
Rust:                             652
Kotlin:                           647
Red:                              644
Icon:                             640
C#:                               638
Swift 4:                          637
C:                                634
REXX:                             626
Clean:                            623
Batch:                            596
T:                                581
SpecBAS:                          580
Java 11:                          580
8th:                              580
Scala:                            578
Lua:                              573
Python 2.7:                       566
Windows Batch:                    563
naz:                              547
Yabasic:                          543
Dart:                             543
Swift:                            530
Brainfuck:                        522
Common Lisp:                      517
tinylisp:                         498
Tcl:                              490
Java 10:                          486
Java 7:                           480
TSQL:                             476
F#:                               475
VBA:                              470
Nim:                              458
Pepe:                             455
Swift 3:                          432
Racket:                           427
C++14:                            419
SWI:                              415
D:                                404
SNOBOL4:                          382
Fortran:                          374
C++:                              357
Go:                               355
Brain:                            352
Oracle SQL 11.2:                  349
Scratch:                          339
Whitespace:                       287
Rockstar:                         286
Pascal:                           282
Deadfish~:                        105
Taxi:                             53
Shakespeare Programming Language: 13

Editors note: The cutoff was set to 40 when generating the list, as it was the smallest cutoff (that was a multiple of 5) that didn't give any false positives like languages named 46 bytes.

Code:

elo.py:

STARTING = 1000
SCALE = 400
K = 10
PAD = 50

import itertools
def concat(x):
    return list(itertools.chain.from_iterable(x))

class Ratings:
    def __init__(self, challenges):
        langs = concat(challenges)
        self.ratings = {lang: STARTING for lang in langs}
        for challenge in challenges:
            self.update_challenge(challenge)

    def update_game(self, first, second, score):
        f_rat = self.ratings[first]
        s_rat = self.ratings[second]

        f_exp = 1/(1 + 10 ** ((s_rat - f_rat) / 400))
        s_exp = 1/(1 + 10 ** ((f_rat - s_rat) / 400))

        f_upd = K * (score - f_exp)
        s_upd = K * ((1 - score) - s_exp)

        self.ratings[first] += f_upd
        self.ratings[second] += s_upd

    def update_challenge(self, scores):
        for lang1 in sorted(scores):
            for lang2 in sorted(scores):
                if lang1 > lang2:
                    s1 = scores[lang1]
                    s2 = scores[lang2]
                    result = 1 if s1 < s2 else 0.5 if s1 == s2 else 0
                    self.update_game(lang1, lang2, result)

    def __str__(self):
        return '\n'.join(key + ':' +
                ' ' * (max(len(lang) + 1 for lang in self.ratings) - len(key)) + str(val)
                         for key, val in sorted(((lang, int(self.ratings[lang]))
                             for lang in self.ratings),
                             key=lambda x:x[::-1], reverse=True))

parse.py:

import csv
import re
import elo

CUTOFF = 40 # change as needed

lines = []
scores = {}
challenges = []
lang_counts = {}
canon_to_actual = {}

with open("merged.csv", encoding="utf-8") as csvfile:
    reader = csv.DictReader(csvfile)
    for row in reader:
        lines.append((row["FirstLine"], row["ParentId"]))

count = 0
for line, challenge in lines:
    line = re.sub("<s(trike)?>.*</s(trike)?>", "", line)
    line = re.sub("<a[^>]*>", "", line)
    line = re.sub("</a>", "", line)
    match = re.match("<.*>(.*)</.*>", line)
    if match:
        line = match.group(1)
        lang = re.match("([^-,\(:]*)", line)
        if lang:
            lang = lang.group(1).strip()
            canon = lang.lower().replace(" ", "")
            canon_to_actual[canon] = lang
            score = re.findall(r"(\d+(?:\.\d+)?)[^0-9]+bytes?", line)
            if score:
                score = score[-1]
                score = eval(score.lstrip("0") or "0")
                c = scores.get(challenge, [])
                c.append((canon, score))
                scores[challenge] = c
                lang_counts[canon] = lang_counts.get(canon, 0) + 1

for c in sorted(scores, key=int):
    results = scores[c]
    c_map = {}
    for canon, score in results:
        if lang_counts[canon] > CUTOFF and re.match("\w", canon):
            lang = canon_to_actual[canon]
            old_score = c_map.get(lang, score)
            c_map[lang] = min(score, old_score)
    challenges.append(c_map)

print(elo.Ratings(challenges))

Here are the original ratings, generated with the buggy code, for posterity.

2016 Results

Jelly:                1906
Pyth:                 1711
GS:                   1674
Japt:                 1653
MATL:                 1607
Dyalog APL:           1580
J:                    1579
CJam:                 1578
Jolf:                 1559
Seriously:            1535
TeaScript:            1499
GolfScript:           1497
Pip:                  1478
Burlesque:            1460
APL:                  1443
O:                    1427
Vitsy:                1424
𝔼𝕊𝕄𝕚𝕟:                1384
Vim:                  1371
q:                    1355
K:                    1322
TI:                   1301
sh:                   1294
Octave:               1289
PARI/GP:              1272
dc:                   1269
GNU sed:              1229
Retina:               1213
x:                    1209
Bash + coreutils:     1207
Bash + GNU utilities: 1201
bc:                   1189
golflua:              1187
Sed:                  1182
HTML:                 1168
Julia:                1165
QBasic:               1156
Sage:                 1146
Ruby:                 1124
AWK:                  1101
ZSH:                  1086
Mathematica:          1083
Gema:                 1079
Bash:                 1079
jq:                   1060
Haskell:              1051
MATLAB:               1042
PowerShell v:         1028
Perl:                 1028
BBC BASIC:            1022
Piet:                 1019
Score:                1018
Shell script:         1017
Mumps:                1015
Languages:            1013
ECMAScript:           1012
Regex:                1000
LiveScript:           993
Tcl:                  989
CoffeeScript:         988
Groovy:               986
Postscript:           984
Windows PowerShell:   981
Powershell:           966
R:                    964
Befunge:              964
gawk:                 951
AutoHotkey:           934
Javascript ES:        931
Smalltalk:            928
STATA:                926
Matlab/Octave:        926
REBOL:                923
SAS:                  917
Clojure:              913
ES:                   909
PHP:                  908
Dart:                 908
Python:               894
JavaScript:           894
Node.js:              893
F#:                   880
Marbelous:            875
Excel VBA:            858
AutoIt:               853
Shell:                850
Common Lisp:          845
Brainfuck:            843
Lua:                  835
Processing:           832
Scheme:               824
CSS:                  823
Pure bash:            821
SWI:                  786
Game Maker Language:  785
FORTH:                778
SpecBAS:              776
Scala:                772
Cobra:                769
HTML + JavaScript:    758
Whitespace:           750
Applescript:          739
T:                    724
Batch:                720
Fortran:              715
Prolog:               711
Turing Machine Code:  708
C:                    706
SQL:                  704
VBA:                  703
Factor:               700
Kotlin:               690
JS:                   686
Pascal:               685
Erlang:               674
Emacs Lisp:           673
OCaml:                668
Racket:               658
VBScript:             654
VB.NET:               643
Swift:                636
D:                    621
Windows Batch:        612
Ceylon:               591
C++:                  587
Java:                 559
Oracle SQL:           548
Delphi:               539
Go:                   537
C#:                   535
Rust:                 528
\$\endgroup\$
17
  • 1
    \$\begingroup\$ This seems to get around the problem of some languages only being used on easy challenges, since two languages are only compared on challenges they have in common. \$\endgroup\$
    – trichoplax is on Codidact now
    Apr 5, 2016 at 13:58
  • \$\begingroup\$ I also like that a language is scored by its shortest answer to a question, so it approximates the best a language can do rather than the average performance across a number of different users. \$\endgroup\$
    – trichoplax is on Codidact now
    Apr 5, 2016 at 14:00
  • 1
    \$\begingroup\$ The Elo system might actually be better that you say, assuming you parse the answers in posted-order. Languages here evolve over time. \$\endgroup\$
    – Nathan Merrill
    Apr 5, 2016 at 18:23
  • \$\begingroup\$ @NathanMerrill They're sorted by question age, so you might be right. \$\endgroup\$
    – isaacg
    Apr 5, 2016 at 19:30
  • 4
    \$\begingroup\$ I think one of the reasons jelly ranks so high is that dennis is the only one who knows how to use it. =) \$\endgroup\$
    – DJMcMayhem
    Apr 22, 2016 at 4:14
  • 1
    \$\begingroup\$ @DJMcMayhem: I don't think so. I think Dennis uses Jelly because it's short (as do I), rather than Jelly being short because Dennis uses it. (You can observe that Dennis tends to do equally well, relative to other entries in the same language, when using a language other than Jelly; but the entry ends up overall longer.) \$\endgroup\$
    – user62131
    Apr 25, 2017 at 16:13
  • \$\begingroup\$ Wish ShortC could be on the list. But almost no one uses it! (besides me and I didn't even make it). Though it's really a shortener because it just expands into C. \$\endgroup\$
    – Wezl
    Apr 30, 2020 at 15:15
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Wezl Even after I fixed the first 2 bugs, shortC still isn't showing up. The language only appears 7 times in the results of my query, which is strange because it shows up way more than that when I search the site. Those 7 times are too few to give it a solid rating. I don't know what's wrong with the query, I didn't write it. \$\endgroup\$
    – isaacg
    May 1, 2020 at 5:43
  • \$\begingroup\$ @isaacg 1 I was just saying I wish people would use it; right now there's no one to compete with. \$\endgroup\$
    – Wezl
    May 1, 2020 at 17:49
  • 2
    \$\begingroup\$ It seems like the query only lists 50000 results, and those are neither the first 50000 nor the last 50000, but several chunks from random places (or am I not using it correctly?) \$\endgroup\$
    – the default.
    Jun 4, 2020 at 12:41
  • \$\begingroup\$ @isaacg Bug: TI-BASIC shows up as TI. (It seems that flags in answers are usually enclosed with code blocks (<code>...</code>) nowadays, so this should be easy to fix.) \$\endgroup\$
    – user99151
    Jan 1, 2021 at 8:29
  • 1
    \$\begingroup\$ New SEDE query to get more reliable results (follow instructions to get full data) \$\endgroup\$
    – Bubbler
    Sep 29, 2021 at 1:01
  • 1
    \$\begingroup\$ How does this deal with flags? The Python parser is pretty difficult to read so I can't figure out exactly. \$\endgroup\$
    – Wheat Wizard Mod
    Oct 4, 2021 at 8:38
  • \$\begingroup\$ FYI for running this script next time, it will score Nibbles poorly because scores are listed like this: x bytes (y nibbles), and y is the last number so it will use that. I did some head to head comparison of nibbles versus jelly and it was 44 W, 9 D, 23 L, so 63% win rate, I would expect Nibbles to be rated higher than Jelly! \$\endgroup\$
    – Darren Smith
    Dec 31, 2022 at 2:19
  • 1
    \$\begingroup\$ @TheThonnu - You've edited in "I have fixed ... Languages with flags in the header were not counted." This is not 'fixing' a 'bug' - this is introducing a bug to correct code. CGCC consensus is that flags change the language. Heavy dependence on the use of flags to perform critical steps that are not counted in the byte score should not be ignored. Ignoring flags will result that languages that often use flags to do this will now be falsely promoted (instead of the single-use flag-containing variants being listed separately). \$\endgroup\$
    – Dominic van Essen
    Jun 26 at 12:23
22
\$\begingroup\$

K-means clustering by code length

Note: This is just a first-pass attempt with a very simple method. There are certainly better ways to approach this but at least this is a start.

My approach here was to get all answers to code golf challenges without bonuses that had (at least somewhat) appropriately formatted post headers, parse out the language name and byte count from the header, perform k-means clustering on the sizes with 6 groups, and for each language select the cluster into which most of the sizes for that language fell. Languages which have been used fewer than 10 times on the site, as well as any answer with a byte count greater than 170, were excluded.

The clusters are listed in ascending order of the values of their cluster centers.

Group 1, mean 12.03099

APL            GS2             Rebmu
Arcyou         Hexagony        rs
AutoIt         J               Sed
Batch          Japt            Self
BC             Jelly           Seriously
Beeswax        Jolf            Stuck
Befunge        K               TeaScript
Brachylog      Labyrinth       TI-BASIC
Brainfuck      Marbelous       Vim
Burlesque      MATL            Vitsy
Candy          Microscript     zsh
Clip           Minkolang
DC             Mouse
DUP            O
Element        Piet
ESMin          Pip
Factor         Platypar
Fission        Prelude
Gema           Pyth
GolfScript     QBASIC

Group 2, mean 31.75217

><>
CJam
Dart
F#
GTB
JQ
Julia
KDB
Mathematica
Matlab
Milky Way
PARI/GP
Perl
Q
Rebol
Regex
Scheme
Shell
Snails

Group 3, mean 54.14769

Awk
Bash
Clojure
D
Foo
Forth
Game Maker Language
Hassium
Pascal
PowerShell
R
Retina
Ruby
Sclipting
Smalltalk
Stata

Group 4, mean 79.65123

BBC Basic        Scala
CoffeeScript     SQL
Common Lisp      Swift
CSS              TCL
Emacs Lisp       VB.NET
Fortran          VBScript
GolfLua
Groovy
Haskell
JavaScript
Lua
Mumps
PHP
Processing
Prolog
Python
Racket
Rust
Sage
SAS

Group 5, mean 109.9524

C
C++
Ceylon
Delphi
Erlang
Gawk
Java
Postscript
VBA

Group 6, mean 147.5168 

AppleScript
C#
Cobra
Go
HTML
OCaml
SpecBAS
Whitespace

Thoughts on this grouping

This is roughly what one might expect, with the golfing languages in tier 1 and Java in tier 5. This particular grouping appears to be somewhat of a success in that regard. However, 6 was probably too many groups; 4 or 5 would likely be sufficient. Heirarchical clustering may be another interesting route for analysis since no number of classes is prespecified.

Disclaimer

This should not, under any circumstances, be used to impose any kind of language handicap or restriction. It's merely for the sake of interest and giving folks a group to mentally compare their scores to, should they feel the need.

For the curious

The data were collected via this Stack Exchange Data Explorer query. The analysis was done in R and is available via this Gist.

\$\endgroup\$
13
  • 19
    \$\begingroup\$ I can spot one fatal flaw in this approach: challenges that would require significantly long code in golfing languages are usually not answered with those languages. For example, as the source of almost all of the Seriously answers, I admit that I usually don't try to answer a challenge with Seriously unless it's under 40 or so bytes (because any longer becomes unmanageable thanks to my poor design decisions). This skews Seriously towards a higher tier than what it probably should be. \$\endgroup\$
    – user45941
    Mar 27, 2016 at 7:00
  • 1
    \$\begingroup\$ @Mego Yep. There's a whole lot I didn't take into account. This is just a means of getting the ball rolling on an approach in the simplest possible way. \$\endgroup\$
    – Alex A.
    Mar 27, 2016 at 7:04
  • \$\begingroup\$ 404 on the gist. When you say "perform k-means clustering on the sizes with 6 groups", what exactly was the input to the clustering algorithm? \$\endgroup\$
    – Peter Taylor
    Mar 27, 2016 at 17:56
  • \$\begingroup\$ @PeterTaylor Looks like I accidentally deleted the gist. I've readded it and updated the URL. The input was the code lengths as parsed from the headers. Those were grouped into 6 classes using k-means and merged back to their respective languages. Then, for each language, I selected the class into which it fell most often. \$\endgroup\$
    – Alex A.
    Mar 27, 2016 at 18:08
  • 1
    \$\begingroup\$ As an avid vim user and a vim golfer, I'm really happy to see it in the same tier as the golfing languages. =D \$\endgroup\$
    – DJMcMayhem
    Mar 28, 2016 at 1:34
  • 7
    \$\begingroup\$ I was quite surprised to see QBASIC in the top tier, until I looked at the QBASIC answers on the site. It's pretty good backup for Mego's comment. I suppose there's probably a somewhat better way to do this, but I'm not really sure it won't be filled with these outliers as well. \$\endgroup\$
    – Geobits
    Mar 28, 2016 at 2:23
  • \$\begingroup\$ Perhaps sampling from a set of challenges with many answers in many different languages would be better, rather than across the entire site, to avoid the problem I brought up. Granted, I still don't think this will result in anything useful. \$\endgroup\$
    – user45941
    Mar 28, 2016 at 7:04
  • 2
    \$\begingroup\$ I think that @Mego's comment deserves some thought. Perhaps we should score based on relation to the median answer of each question? \$\endgroup\$
    – Not that Charles
    Mar 28, 2016 at 14:31
  • 3
    \$\begingroup\$ What poor souls answered in Delphi? \$\endgroup\$
    – Morgan Thrapp
    Mar 28, 2016 at 18:34
  • 1
    \$\begingroup\$ I think BATCH is in the first group because not many people answer in BATCH, and, when they do, it's usually on an easy question. \$\endgroup\$
    – Conor O'Brien
    Apr 3, 2016 at 22:36
  • \$\begingroup\$ @CᴏɴᴏʀO'Bʀɪᴇɴ more reasons why this is biased -- cool, but biased \$\endgroup\$
    – cat
    Apr 5, 2016 at 1:21
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Mego this is probably how Brainfuck ended up in group 1 \$\endgroup\$
    – Felix Dombek
    Oct 6, 2017 at 2:25
  • \$\begingroup\$ where's vyxal? isn't it a programming lang that's used? \$\endgroup\$
    – The Empty String Photographer
    Jun 10 at 15:14

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