stackoverflow

Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood are starting up a new project, Stackoverflow.com, meant to be a resource for the arrogant programmers - the type of programmer (the norm, according to Spolsky) who doesn't bother buying computer books, learns by trial and error, does theodd online tutorial and then turns to Google when there are problems native genius can't solve. The point being that solutions often end up being buried in forums or accessible only on payment of $12.95, or sometimes just turning up far far down the Google hit list, while the early throng of queries rank high. There will be a weekly podcast; the first has just gone up.

In the course of the podcast Spolsky and Atwood started talking about Firefox's market share, which Atwood said was now very big, he didn't want to quote a number because he'd be wrong, but he'd say between 10 and 20%. I don't know what the actual figure is; for this blog it's closer to 45%:


(pie chart courtesy of Sitemeter)

The OS breakdown, since you ask, looks like this:


30% seems like more Mac users than one would find in the computing population at large. Not sure what this says about the PP readership. Perhaps a disproportionate number are susceptible to inputting more languages than they actually know (Azeri! Armenian! Tamil!).