the-rankings-algorithm.scroll

groups All
title The PLDB Rankings Algorithm

import header.scroll
printTitle

wideColumns 1

PLDB ranks languages by combining scores in 5 broad categories:

- number of estimated users
- number of languages built using this language ("foundation score")
- number of estimated jobs
- number of languages it has influenced
- number of measurements PLDB has on a language

# The Ranking Algorithm

katex PLDBScore(x) = 5*ConceptCount - UserEstRank(x) - FoundationScoreRank(x) - JobsEstRank(x) - LinkRank(x) - MeasurementsRank(x)

You can verify this yourself by reading the source code.

Each one of the five main inputs is composed from many sources and well over 100 signals go into calculating the rankings.
 link acknowledgements.html sources

# About the rankings
In the beginning, PLDB did not have any rankings system. But I learned over the years that an imperfect ranking system is _vastly_ more useful than no ranking system. For example, languages used to be listed alphabetically which made it very hard to find the pages for the languages people used most. At least in my opinion, the site has become significantly more useful since I added the rankings system.

Along those lines, improvements to the rankings system make the site better, and therefore I am rather frequently trying to add more signals and improve the algorithm. 100% of the data and code produced by PLDB is open source, public domain, and published to git, so it can be a team effort to continuously build better rankings.
 https://github.com/breck7/pldb published to git

import footer.scroll