Confidence interval scoring

Question

Question migrated form http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10019576/confidence-interval-scoring-with-programming-languages#comment12812602_10019576

I used a CI scoring algorithm from http://evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html, The data is most liked programmings and most disliked programming languages of each person. According to the scores it should seem that Python should have a relative higher score, but according the the score data it is in the middle. Am I doing something wrong? Joel Cornett mentioned You need to use Student's T curve, not the normal distribution for smaller sample sizes. Is there a way to fix this?

Here is my gist https://gist.github.com/2305834, which contains the data, scores and the script that generates the scores.

Answer 1

I suggest a much simpler score: (#positives/#negatives) * weight for #respondents (say ln[3+#respondents]).

this gives a more satisfying ranking IMHO:

for  ag   (for/ag).ln[3+for+ag]  language 
3044 0127 193.25 Python
0458 0024 118.01 Clojure
0965 0058 115.36 C
0518 0032 102.23 Haskell
0145 0011 066.82 Lua
1717 0234 055.60 Ruby
0321 0034 055.52 Lisp
0828 0116 048.92 C#
0162 0021 040.31 Erlang
0190 0027 037.96 Scheme
0233 0042 031.22 Scala
0086 0013 030.60 OCaml
0069 0011 027.72 Smalltalk
1411 0433 024.51 JavaScript
0188 0044 023.33 Other
0361 0114 019.54 CoffeeScript
0056 0015 016.07 D
0040 0014 011.55 Forth
0098 0046 010.63 Assembly
0326 0218 009.43 Objective_C
0310 0223 008.74 Perl
0101 0077 006.82 SQL
0529 0564 006.57 C++
0038 0031 005.24 Delphi
0662 1064 004.64 PHP
0024 0020 004.62 Ada
0011 0008 004.25 Rexx
0551 1067 003.82 Java
0032 0037 003.70 Tcl
0023 0025 003.62 Fortan
0066 0097 003.48 Shell
0024 0028 003.43 Pascal
0093 0185 002.83 Actionscript
0036 0091 001.93 ColdFusion
0010 0071 000.62 Cobol
0045 0633 000.46 Visual_Basic