34
\$\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\$
  • 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 '16 at 16:58
  • 7
    \$\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 '16 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 '16 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 '16 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 '16 at 18:59
  • 3
    \$\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 '16 at 19:20
  • 3
    \$\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 '16 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 '16 at 20:01
  • 13
    \$\begingroup\$ @PeterTaylor Also, for the record, I think a handicap system is a terrible idea. \$\endgroup\$ – Not that Charles Mar 25 '16 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 '16 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 '16 at 21:59
  • \$\begingroup\$ We already have some data in response to this code challenge. \$\endgroup\$ – xnor Mar 25 '16 at 23:13
  • 9
    \$\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 '16 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 '16 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 '16 at 1:18
18
\$\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.

2020 Results:

05AB1E:                           1934
Jelly:                            1867
Stax:                             1845
Ohm v2:                           1805
Husk:                             1802
Neim:                             1792
Canvas:                           1778
gs2:                              1768
Japt:                             1763
Actually:                         1752
MathGolf:                         1737
MATL:                             1714
SOGL V0.12:                       1696
Gaia:                             1681
Pyke:                             1673
RProgN 2:                         1625
Convex:                           1625
Jstx:                             1603
Jolf:                             1597
Sesos:                            1582
Oasis:                            1571
Brachylog:                        1551
PlatyPar:                         1548
Pyth:                             1533
Implicit:                         1525
TeaScript:                        1511
SOGL:                             1507
V:                                1486
Seriously:                        1477
CJam:                             1464
APL:                              1463
K:                                1460
J:                                1441
QuadR:                            1436
Charcoal:                         1396
Ohm:                              1386
𝔼𝕊𝕄𝕚𝕟:                            1378
Japt v2.0a0:                      1376
Vitsy:                            1375
Recursiva:                        1364
K4:                               1364
GolfScript:                       1364
Burlesque:                        1358
Dyalog APL:                       1356
x86 machine code:                 1348
RProgN:                           1338
Candy:                            1330
Keg:                              1322
cQuents:                          1321
Alice:                            1320
Minkolang 0.14:                   1299
Runic Enchantments:               1297
Stacked:                          1285
Perl 6:                           1281
q/kdb+:                           1278
APL+WIN:                          1278
Attache:                          1257
Befunge:                          1254
Befunge 98:                       1248
Snails:                           1247
Retina:                           1243
Jellyfish:                        1242
O:                                1234
TI:                               1218
Triangular:                       1200
Add++:                            1200
Perl 5:                           1198
Octave / MATLAB:                  1194
Z80Golf:                          1188
Labyrinth:                        1188
Ahead:                            1182
Befunge93:                        1174
Wolfram Language:                 1173
dc:                               1168
Hexagony:                         1168
Cascade:                          1162
Ly:                               1156
PARI/GP:                          1152
33:                               1147
Microscript II:                   1143
Maple:                            1141
Underload:                        1138
Cubix:                            1137
BBC BASIC:                        1134
jq:                               1127
Pip:                              1123
Sed:                              1122
Bubblegum:                        1122
Cheddar:                          1121
QBIC:                             1120
q:                                1119
AppleScript:                      1101
ink:                              1100
REXX:                             1098
x86:                              1096
Retina 0.8.2:                     1090
Ruby 1.9:                         1080
Haskell:                          1079
Gema:                             1074
Julia:                            1073
Arcyóu:                           1060
Scala:                            1056
Proton:                           1055
GAP:                              1054
SmileBASIC:                       1053
HTML:                             1051
Octave:                           1048
vim:                              1047
Ruby:                             1046
LOGO:                             1045
MUMPS:                            1041
MY:                               1040
Julia 1.0:                        1040
Bash + GNU utilities:             1040
Julia 0.6:                        1028
PHP 7:                            1021
ShapeScript:                      1019
Röda:                             1019
Mathematica:                      1019
Windows PowerShell:               1016
Bash + coreutils:                 1012
Zsh:                              1011
Perl:                             1009
GNU Sed:                          1004
8086 machine code:                1002
bc:                               991
Brian & Chuck:                989
JavaScript:                       983
PostScript:                       982
Marbelous:                        978
Pure Bash:                        976
Rebol:                            970
MATLAB/Octave:                    964
Bash + Unix utilities:            963
R:                                958
ES6:                              957
SmileBASIC 3:                     945
CoffeeScript:                     945
PowerShell v2+:                   940
PowerShell v3+:                   939
AWK:                              933
Groovy:                           924
PowerShell:                       921
C#:                               916
Matlab:                           915
Tcl/Tk:                           912
Python 3.6:                       906
6502 machine code:                902
Python 3:                         892
Javascript ES6:                   890
Jq 1.5:                           883
Google Sheets:                    873
TXR Lisp:                         868
Python 3.8:                       865
Nim:                              861
Chip:                             858
PHP:                              852
Python 2:                         849
Mouse:                            847
Erlang:                           845
Cubically:                        838
Python 3.5:                       833
bash:                             832
JS:                               831
Python:                           809
Autohotkey:                       806
Processing:                       805
TeX:                              804
Piet:                             803
Java 8:                           799
Node.js:                          794
IBM/Lotus Notes Formula:          783
C99:                              777
HTML + JavaScript:                772
SpecBAS:                          771
Brain:                            769
Excel:                            764
VBScript:                         761
SQL:                              760
Excel VBA:                        759
SAS:                              758
Java:                             757
Swift 4:                          756
Cobra:                            751
Prolog:                           747
Batch:                            743
Dart:                             740
C:                                737
AutoIt:                           731
Icon:                             729
Scheme:                           727
AHK:                              725
brainfuck:                        722
Forth:                            722
MarioLANG:                        720
SQF:                              718
Kotlin:                           718
Clean:                            716
Pepe:                             715
Hassium:                          713
Elixir:                           713
Red:                              710
Fourier:                          710
SWI:                              707
Emacs Lisp:                       707
Factor:                           701
Delphi:                           701
Rust:                             700
SimpleTemplate:                   697
Yabasic:                          696
OCaml:                            695
CSS:                              692
Lua:                              684
QBasic:                           683
GameMaker Language:               672
8th:                              663
Racket:                           661
Ceylon:                           636
Java 10:                          635
Python 2.7:                       626
C# .NET:                          624
Windows Batch:                    620
F#:                               613
C++11:                            613
Clojure:                          606
Assembly:                         604
VBA:                              602
TSQL:                             600
Swift 3:                          597
Common Lisp:                      591
Go:                               589
Small Basic:                      586
T:                                584
VB.NET:                           579
C++14:                            573
Fortran:                          562
Swift:                            554
OIL:                              540
D:                                537
C++:                              529
Oracle SQL:                       516
Java 7:                           513
Tcl:                              508
Oracle SQL 11.2:                  504
ListSharp:                        504
LOLCODE:                          503
S.I.L.O.S:                        499
LaTeX:                            492
Pascal:                           475
Taxi:                             445
Seed:                             444
Whitespace:                       436
SNOBOL4:                          430
Malbolge:                         410
Emojicode:                        376
Pyramid Scheme:                   339
Shakespeare Programming Language: 302
ArnoldC:                          287

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 = 10

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

with open('ratings.csv') as csvfile:
    reader = csv.DictReader(csvfile)
    for row in reader:
        lines.append((row['Body'], 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("([^-,\(:]*)", line)
        if lang:
            lang = lang.group(1).strip()
            canon = lang.lower().replace(' ', '')
            canon_to_actual[canon] = lang
            score = re.search("(\d+)\s*\w*\)?$", line)
            if score:
                score = int(score.group(1))
                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\$
  • 2
    \$\begingroup\$ Great list, and it also represent well what's the reality. Actually, there's one more thing to do: make it case insensitive. There's for instance, one entry for Javascript ES and an other one for JavaScript ES \$\endgroup\$ – Katenkyo Apr 5 '16 at 11:23
  • \$\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 Apr 5 '16 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 Apr 5 '16 at 14:00
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Katenkyo Fixed the capitalization problems. \$\endgroup\$ – isaacg Apr 5 '16 at 14:56
  • \$\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 '16 at 18:23
  • \$\begingroup\$ @NathanMerrill They're sorted by question age, so you might be right. \$\endgroup\$ – isaacg Apr 5 '16 at 19:30
  • 3
    \$\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\$ – James Apr 22 '16 at 4:14
  • \$\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 '17 at 16:13
  • \$\begingroup\$ @isaacg, could you implement a matching to <a>...</a> links? The majority of new answers have hyperlinks to the language repo. \$\endgroup\$ – user92069 Apr 30 at 11:00
  • \$\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 at 15:15
  • \$\begingroup\$ Bugs: missing 05AB1E/osable, lists matlab / octave / 'matlab/octave' separate \$\endgroup\$ – Wezl Apr 30 at 15:19
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Wezl The majority of 05AB1E answers hyperlink 05AB1E in the header, that's why it doesn't show up. \$\endgroup\$ – user92069 May 1 at 3:39
  • 3
    \$\begingroup\$ @Λ̸̸ I fixed two bugs, the hyperlink bug and a bug that meant that languages with numbers in the name weren't counted. 05AB1E was hit bu both of those, now it's shot to the top. \$\endgroup\$ – isaacg May 1 at 5:41
  • \$\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 at 5:43
  • 1
    \$\begingroup\$ @KrzysztofSzewczyk This is talking about the old version of the program, which predated TIO. The new version of the program fixes that problem. \$\endgroup\$ – isaacg Jun 8 at 17:35
16
\$\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\$
  • 15
    \$\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 '16 at 7:00
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    \$\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 '16 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 '16 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 '16 at 18:08
  • \$\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\$ – James Mar 28 '16 at 1:34
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    \$\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 '16 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 '16 at 7:04
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    \$\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 '16 at 14:31
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    \$\begingroup\$ What poor souls answered in Delphi? \$\endgroup\$ – Morgan Thrapp Mar 28 '16 at 18:34
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    \$\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 '16 at 22:36
  • \$\begingroup\$ @CᴏɴᴏʀO'Bʀɪᴇɴ more reasons why this is biased -- cool, but biased \$\endgroup\$ – cat Apr 5 '16 at 1:21
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Mego this is probably how Brainfuck ended up in group 1 \$\endgroup\$ – Felix Dombek Oct 6 '17 at 2:25

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