Patch Up Those Image Tags
by Randal L. Schwartz
One of the wonderful things about Deja News (www .dejanews.com) is that it has a long memory. It lets me think about how things have changed over the past few years by examining the messages people have been posting.
The other day, I got to thinking, "Has the number of job postings for Perl gone up, gone down, or stayed relatively constant compared to the overall posting rate?" So I started doing a few queries by hand for Perl and other programming languages, using various date ranges over the newsgroup misc.jobs.offered, which is where all job postings are supposed to go. After doing about a dozen of these, I got bored, knowing that I was typing pretty much the same thing over and over again. Then it dawned on mewrite a program!
So, I reverse-engineered the interface (more later), and started dumping numbers to the screen from various queries. After staring at the numbers for a while, I thought about importing them into a spreadsheet to get a graph, then remembered that I hadn't yet played with GIFgraph (available from the CPAN at www.cpan.org and dozens of mirrors around the world). So, I added the graphing right into the program.
The resulting graph is shown in
Figure 1. It displays a comparison of the number of job postings for some popular programming languages, and their hit counts, going back four years. Note that offers of Perl jobs are relatively steady at about 200 hits per day, and that Java surpassed COBOL just a few months back. The program that produced this output is in
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