2022 Recap
January 3, 2023 — 2022 was a breakout year for a Programming Language DataBase (PLDB). We are now used by over ten thousand people in a slow week and probably were used by over a million people on the year (I can't be too exact since our stuff is public domain and we don't do much tracking). Some of the world's top software people got in touch with us and we now provide analysis on how to make their companies' languages better. Not bad for a research effort started by a kid from Brockton without a PhD! I am 100% convinced that someone can (and will) revolutionize research in any and every domain simply by copying our tech and creating a high-quality public domain CSV file for their domain.
2022 was the year PLDB got the mythical product market fit.
Thank you
I started PLDB, but in 2022 the community took it to a new level. Over 50 people contributed code directly to the git repo and many more contributed via the web. From the bottom of my heart, thank you to everyone who helped in 2022. Your work will directly help programming language designers build better languages and help demystify the world of programming languages for everyone else. And if you believe, as I do, that better languages make a better world, than your work is helping build a better world.
2023 Roadmap
- In 2023 we should continue to prioritize the most important thing: more data.
- We need more data on language features.
- We need faster and easier tooling for community leaders to keep their languages' pages up to date.
- Build speed will always be a top priority.
- We should keep generalizing the code base so that CancerDB and other projects can benefit from our work.
- Improve Grammar to fix the most annoying common problems and improve documentation.
- We should also do more on the influence graph of languages.
- Better search.
- We should improve language page design to be more reader friendly and useful.
- Finally, we should do more outreach to programming language designers and communities in the real world and make sure we do more listening to our users and attending to their needs.
That's it! Thank you everyone and I look forwarding to building together in public with you in 2023!