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Comment by bradleyland | Hacker News Reader

"We asked subscribers to our developer newsletter (788 respondents) and professional developers via StackOverflow (169 respondents)."

With all due respect to the FogCreek team, I'm not sure these numbers could be considered a representation of the development community in general. FogCreek makes Kiln, which according to Joel's (FogCreek CEO) blog is "a web-based version control and code review system based on Mercurial and tightly integrated with FogBugz." I know Joel's writing has broad appeal (I know I'm a fan), but it would stand to reason that there would be a disproportionately high number of Hg users in these results, would it not?

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I have to agree. This post and the survey results do not really meet my standards for accuracy, so I've taken then down while we rework it.

We compared the numbers we got from our newsletter survey and those we got from Stack Overflow and they were actually much closer than even we expected. Mercurial gets a slight bump in our newsletter responses, but SVN still dominates across the board.

And if you look at questions on Stack Overflow you've got: 532 tagged [Git] 119 tagged [Mercurial] Just to give you a (unscientific) sense of the bias in the Stack Overflow community.

I think this metric is not really useful: Maybe git is just harder to use (no git/mercurial please, just my first thought on the usage of question tags as a - unscientific - metric).

The problem is the bias inherent in the sample. The Joel on Software development community, Kiln mailing list, and StackOverflow all have something in common - they were started by Joel, and their initial userbase comes largely from followers of his blog.

I wonder what the results would've been had GitHub polled their userbase? Or if you asked a random sample of Googlers (hint: 100% would say "Perforce professionally", and then a good chunk would say "Git personally")? Or if Fortune magazine had had CIOs poll the individual employees of their firms (I bet you'd see a whole lot more Perforce, and a fair bit of "What's version control?")?

Yeah, not really useful. The number of questions needs to be normalized by number and type of people using it, though, for it to be a halfway useful indicator of difficulty. Even then, the amount of information available about each elsewhere on the web will change whether someone needs to ask a question about it.

By similar logic, PHP is harder to use than C.

It's not?

You also forget that Kiln has it's own dedicated Stack Exchange site. http://kiln.stackexchange.com/

This one has 1300+ questions!

Amen. Whenever I read a joel-on-software or FogCreek blog post, I feel like I'm being exposed to a clever advertisement, where the clever factor decreases linearly over time. This isn't the first time I've seen appeal-to-authority arguments, bad statistics, or other dubious rhetoric there.

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