IEEE Spectrum July, 2014 - 4

BacK StorY_
editor in chief

Susan Hassler, s.hassler@ieee.org
executive editor

Glenn Zorpette, g.zorpette@ieee.org
editorial director, digital

Harry Goldstein, h.goldstein@ieee.org
managing editor

Elizabeth A. Bretz, e.bretz@ieee.org
senior art director

Mark Montgomery, m.montgomery@ieee.org
senior editors

Stephen Cass (Resources), cass.s@ieee.org
Erico Guizzo (Digital), e.guizzo@ieee.org
Jean Kumagai, j.kumagai@ieee.org
Samuel K. Moore (News), s.k.moore@ieee.org
Tekla S. Perry, t.perry@ieee.org
Joshua J. Romero (Interactive), j.j.romero@ieee.org
Philip E. Ross, p.ross@ieee.org
David Schneider, d.a.schneider@ieee.org
deputy art director Brandon Palacio, b.palacio@ieee.org
photography director Randi Klett, randi.klett@ieee.org
associate art director Erik Vrielink, e.vrielink@ieee.org
associate editors

Ariel Bleicher, a.bleicher@ieee.org
Rachel Courtland, r.courtland@ieee.org
Celia Gorman (Multimedia), celia.gorman@ieee.org
Eliza Strickland, e.strickland@ieee.org
assistant editor Willie D. Jones, w.jones@ieee.org
senior copy editor Joseph N. Levine, j.levine@ieee.org
copy editor Michele Kogon, m.kogon@ieee.org
editorial researcher Alan Gardner, a.gardner@ieee.org

Building a Better Ranking

executive producer, spectrum radio
assistant producer, spectrum radio

administrative assistants

hen IEEE SpEctrum wanted to update its 2011 list of the top
10 programming languages, nick Diakopoulos was a natural
choice for the project. Diakopoulos is a leader among the new
breed of computational journalists. he couples a reporter's story
sense with programming expertise in big data, visualization,
and interactive technologies, and he is a fellow at the Columbia
University Journalism School, in new York City.
Diakopoulos says the initial hurdle was just figuring out
which programming-related data sources had useful information that
could be extracted via an application programming interface, or API.
"Spectrum's editors and I came up with 10 to 15 sources; then I had to go
through and figure out which ones were realistic," he says. The sources
included Topsy's database of tweets, open-source repository Github, and
the Ieee's own Xplore archive of technical papers.
Once the sources had been identified, Diakopoulos began working out
how to combine the data from them and formulate rankings. "We let the
notion of transparency guide the design, so that users could play with the
weighting of the data sources to come up with their own rankings," he says.
After about three iterations of the design, the result is the general-purpose
ranking you see in Dataflow ("The Top 10 Programming Languages," in this
issue). For the interactive application, go to the online version of the article.
It lets you customize the ranking for your own particular interest, whether
it's finding out what language skills are hot in the job market or which
languages are dominant in the mobile sector. n

JUL 2014

north american

SPectrUm.ieee.orG

Ramona Foster, r.foster@ieee.org
Nancy T. Hantman, n.hantman@ieee.org
intern Theresa Chong
contributing editors

Evan Ackerman, Mark Anderson, John Blau, Robert N.
Charette, Peter Fairley, Tam Harbert, Mark Harris, David
Kushner, Robert W. Lucky, Paul McFedries, Prachi Patel,
Richard Stevenson, Lawrence Ulrich, Paul Wallich
director, periodicals production services Peter Tuohy
editorial & Web production manager Roy Carubia
senior electronic layout specialist Bonnie Nani
spectrum online
Web production coordinator Jacqueline L. Parker
multimedia production specialist Michael Spector
editorial advisory board

Susan Hassler, Chair; Gerard A. Alphonse, Francine D. Berman,
Jason Cong*, Sudhir Dixit, Limor Fried, Kenneth Y. Goldberg,
Bin He, Robert Hebner, Chenming Hu*, Grant Jacoby,
Christopher J. James, Norberto Lerendegui, John P. Lewis,
Steve Mann, Jacob Ostergaard, Umit Ozguner, John Rogers,
Jonathan Rothberg, Umar Saif, Gaurav Sharma, Takao Someya,
Sergio Verdú, Jeffrey M. Voas, Kazuo Yano, Larry Zhang*,
Yu Zheng, Kun Zhou
* Chinese-language edition
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07.14

citing articles in ieee spectrum IEEE Spectrum publishes an international and a North American edition, as
indicated at the bottom of each page. Both have the same editorial content, but because of differences in advertising, page
numbers may differ. In citations, you should include the issue designation. For example, Dataflow is in IEEE Spectrum, Vol. 51,
no. 7 (INT), July 2014, p. 52, or in IEEE Spectrum, Vol. 51, no. 7 (NA), July 2014, p. 68.

Sharon Basco
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum July, 2014