If you haven’t seen The Right Tool, you should check it out. It’s a little web doodad where you can rank programming languages according to how well they’re described by various statements, like “This language is very flexible” or “The thought that I may still be using this language in twenty years time fills me with dread”. It summarizes the results and displays them, letting you see what the consensus view is on each language, which languages are similar to or different from which others, etc.

I saw this a year or so ago, and one thing that intrigued me was the variety in the types of statements on which you could rate the languages. Some of them have an obviously subjective, value-judgment nature, and seem to be evaluating the language on overall quality. Other statements seem to have to do more with how widely-used the language is, independent of how much people like it. Still others describe the language’s suitability for particular tasks.

The Right Tool lets you see how languages compare on a particular statement, or how a particular language stacks up on various statements, and it lets you compare two languages. It also lets you see which statements are “similar to” other statements, in the sense that languages described well by one statement also tend to be described well by another. What it doesn’t do is let you see how languages perform on groups of statements like the ones I just described — i.e., “quality-judgment” statements vs “versatility” statements.

In a happy twist of fate, I recently discovered that raw data from The Right Tool is available. So I decided to use that data for my own nefarious purposes, namely, to see how languages compare when you group the statements into categories and aggregate language rankings within a category. What I wanted to see was whether, for instance, languages that are widely-used are also well-liked, and that sort of thing. Why did I want to see this? Because it’s. . . an interesting question!

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I play a lot of Scrabble. In this day and age, it’s often a point of pride for people to say they’re not on Facebook. Well, I’m on Facebook, but most of my time on the site is spent playing other people with the Scrabble app.

I’ve gotten pretty good over the years, but I’m still pretty puny in comparison to the really good players. I often start random-matchup games with other Scrabble users who are total strangers to me, and every once in a while I’ll get matched with one of these heavyweights who just blows me away. More often, I get matched with a lightweight who I just blow away. Sometimes I get matched with a middleweight like me and we rematch each other endlessly.

Inevitably, of course, I found myself wondering: What is it that makes good Scrabble players good? Like, what do they do differently? Do they make more good plays, or fewer bad plays? Is it really true what everyone says about how learning all the 2-letter words is the key to victory? What is it that separates the wheat from the chaff, Scrabble-wise?

Well, that’s an. . . (drumroll) interesting question! And in typical Interesting Question fashion, I decided to try to analyze it by getting my hands on some data.

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