Google Code Search

Via Lambda the Ultimate: Google Code Search is up!!!

This is a subengine of the Google search engine that narrows the search to pages of public source code only. VERY useful for learning how to program.

One of the features it includes is a language search, so that you can narrow your code searches only to the language you're interested in (sensible). So naturally I tried with Scheme! As I write this, there are exactly 400 pages of Scheme code in Google's database. Pretty shabby. The same search for C++ turned up 348,000 hits, and for Java 807,000. So that accords pretty well with the Tiobe rankings that I blogged about (and have since been updated again: Scheme fell two more places!!! ARGH!!!) the other day.

Interestingly, while Python is about where we would expect it to be (given the relative positions of C++ and Scheme) at 130,000 hits, Ruby only nets a mere 100 hits? (???) Can that be right? Maybe this is just a function of Ruby's recent rise in popularity. The Tiobe page, after all, shows it up 13 places from this tme last year in the rankings. I guess I should stop watching the Google code page since one can guess that Ruby will soon shoot past Scheme in terms of amount of available code on the web.

At least I can take comfort in the fact that Haskell probably won't. It isn't even supported by the Google Code Search! Here is the result page. Searches for Ocaml and ML also generate the same error. But Ada is there. Conclusion: Google coders use Object Oriented languages and no Functional ones!