Re: 20 years of lua-l

[Hisham <h@...>]

On 20 February 2017 at 20:34, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo
<lhf@tecgraf.puc-rio.br> wrote:
>>> Traffic in lua-l has decreased in the last 5 years
>> 2012 was the year when LuaJIT got its own mailing list.
>
> Indeed. Here are the stats for the LuaJIT list:
>
>         2012:   2073
>         2013:   2310
>         2014:   1861
>         2015:   1518
>         2016:   719
>         2017:   54
>
> It explains some loss of traffic in lua-l but not nearly all of it.

Yeah, I gathered those stats too after I posted. The LuaJIT list was
never as active as lua-l (among the reasons I think there's the fact
that there's not much room for language design discussions there, and
also that they use the Github issue tracker for development/bug
discussions).

It's comforting to see that there hasn't been a proportional exodus in
the number of subscribers. But for those of us who subscribe to both
lists it is clear that some people who were active participants here
became more like lurkers and moved their activity there (conversely,
I'm more of a lurker there, I subscribe but I don't read it
regularly). When a group partitions in two, it's natural that the
overall amount of communication reduces: n talking among themselves +
m talking among themselves < n+m talking among themselves. The effect
of this unfortunate rift in the overall health of the community,
however, is hard to measure.

I do hope, however, that the dwindling numbers of the mailing list are
more due to a generational shift regarding email. I took the effort to
scrape some numbers from the Python mailing list as a comparison:

1999: 18986
2000: 43670
2001: 55614
2002: 57108
2003: 63897
2004: 56420
2005: 59929
2006: 60986
2007: 50492
2008: 50584
2009: 44835
2010: 32037
2011: 22333
2012: 19297
2013: 25366
2014: 19738
2015: 17925
2016: 16477
2017: 1595

Uploaded the graph here: http://i.imgur.com/evPUqUy.png

It seems the decline of mailing lists is a general trend, which
matches my perception, as we barely use the LuaRocks mailing list
anymore. (Looking at those numbers, I did remember that Python did
have its traumatic moment with Py3k/Python 3.0 in 2007-2008 — around
the time Rails was picking steam, IIRC — but it seems to have lived
through it).

Does anyone know if StackOverflow publishes activity stats for its
tags? I couldn't find it.

-- Hisham