TIOBE Index for January 2016 | Hacker News Reader

TIOBE Index for January 2016

tiobe.com

33 pointsryandvm25 comments

The Redmonk rankings are much better. As opposed to TIOBE, who look at counts of internet search results, Redmonk looks at code in Github and questions on Stack Overflow. There should be an update out in the next couple weeks; here is the latest from half a year ago : https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2015/07/01/language-rankings-6-1...

+1 for the redmonk.com link. This data looks more inline with what I see everyday.

I might be wrong but Redmonk list makes more sense to me too.

I know it's based on some empirical data, but every time I've looked at a TIOBE index has made absolutely no sense to me.

Delphi/ObjectPascal above both Swift AND ObjC? Sure, that makes sense. If it's 1997.

Delphi is very alive (I'm moderator in a Delphi forum). Think this way: Delphi/FreePascal have almost all the market for a Pascal-alike syntax for them alone.

With the C-family you have a lot of options.

Also: Nothing beat Delphi at doing RAD apps today.

Object Pascal turns up in all kinds of places. WHATWG (https://whatwg.org/) wrote their Wattsi build tool in Pascal:

https://github.com/whatwg/wattsi

When I read Assembly Language at 9 I also know I have no clue.

Tiobe can't be right. It has Assembly ahead of Ruby and right behind JavaScript. What???

Redmonk looks flawed too. I would expect GitHub to create a major sampling bias in favor of smaller, throwaway projects, and in fact, a quick search(1) on GitHub appears to show 2.2 million projects smaller than a kilobyte that have never gotten a single star. Should those be counted? Do they really reflect anything meaningful about the language's rank?

In my opinion, the only meaningful measure of a programming language worth quantifying from the net are StackOverFlow tags: they can be counted and read and provide a real reflection of the language's community without giving any special preference to language, license, or context.

Everything else is hopelessly subjective: whether or not the language maps well to a particular problem, whether it maps well to the way you like to program, and whether it fits into the ecosystem in which you plan to deploy it. You can't measure those with google searches.

(1) https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=size%3A%3C1+stars...

Just curious, but are there proper heuristics that are easily implementable to improve the ranking a language receives from github usage?

For example, only count repositories that have more than 2 stars.

I don't like cutting repos because they are under a certain size, because even a few bytes may be genuinely useful and widely used, but a repository nobody is looking at or really using is most likely a pet project.

Maybe count only projects with > 2 stars (or forks?) OR projects with over a kilobyte of code? Perhaps such a project with no forks, no stars, but a lot of code might be a reference implementation or used in a talk or blog post or something but isn't useful other than to reference.

I agree counting all github repos is a silly way to do it.

Poor Objective C, nobody likes you.

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/Object...

Notable is the search-engine-optimized rise of Groovy from #82 to #17 in a mere 12 months. The subsequent TIOBE comment "Scala might gain a permanent top 20 position soon" is probably a back-handed dig by TIOBE at the likely impermanence of Groovy's top 20 position.

The last time Groovy made the top 20, it hit #18 in Oct 2013, but 3 months later (Jan 2014), had dropped back out of the top 50 (#32 in Nov, #46 in Dec). TIOBE said the following month "The data is produced by one of the Chinese sites that we track is interpreted incorrectly by our algorithms. After we fixed this bug, Groovy lost much of its ratings." But before that fix happened, interviews with the current Apache spokesperson for Groovy (Guillaume Laforge) promoting Groovy's top 20 position were published in 5 online rags (www.infoworld.com, www.eweek.com, cacm.acm.org, jaxenter.com, and glaforge.appspot.com), and all of them quickly appeared in Google's top 30 search results for "groovy programming" and remained there for 6 to 12 months afterwards.

It's a good bet that same feedback effect will be engineered before Groovy starts losing its new top 20 ranking, perhaps before next month.

In fact, this sort of thing also happened with Groovy in December 2010. Groovy began a sudden rise from outside the top 50 when Groovy tech lead Jochen Theodorou "volunteered" his services to Tiobe in late 2010 to help them improve their algorithms. In April 2011, however, Groovy fell from #25 to #65 on Tiobe in a single month after they increased the number of search engines they monitor.

These fleeting peaks for Groovy in the TIOBE rankings (#25 in Apr 2011, #18 in Oct 2013, #17 in Jan 2016) between its usual ranking of somewhere between #51 and #100 (e.g. #82 only 12 months ago) are a bad thing for Groovy because of damage to its reputation as a solid language suitable for long-term IT solutions. Such ranking volatility gives off the stench of smoke-and-mirrors marketing intended to benefit a single stake-holder, probably the person who the groovy-lang.org DNS domain is the personal property of.

[1] http://www.infoworld.com/t/application-development/c-pulls-a...

How in the world did Go drop out of the top 50 based on everything in the news this past year.

Look, Go might be gaining in popularity, but there's just no way it could compete with behemoths like Apex, Ladder Logic, and ABAP.

This is the epitome of sarcasm.

thegeekpirate mentioned in the "Why I Love Rust" discussion that TIOBE filters out false positives for Go by only matching it along with "Google":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863654

Exactly that's what I thought. I was assuming Go, Rust had lot of traction this year.

I came away wondering the same thing. Makes no sense.

I highly enjoyed the article: http://i.imgur.com/qGEjNVL.png

It's pretty amazing that Python is basically mainstream at this point. Right?

It's also odd that they're aren't more Python jobs.

I always am perplexed with how C and C++ are so high on this list. Given that some (all?) of the measure is based on search engine results. When I had some C/C++ back when I was in college, I was very underwhelmed at the number of resources available online. I had taught myself web development just by Googling everything I had an issue with. Tried the same with C/C++ and felt there was an couple orders of magnitude less available information.

C++ developer here. IMHO the easiest access to quality information are books (usually not for free) but apart from that I was always able to find everything on-line -standard draft, language changes proposals, references, SO questions, blogs, talks, OSS projects, OS/hw specifications - you name it. Do you mean anything in particular you were not able to find?

Yea, I can't remember as it's been many years but I do remember finding maybe one or two sites talking about what I needed (somewhat), and what I was working with was probably pretty entry-level stuff.

How do you explain JavaScript going down?

Is it because of the rise of languages that compile to JavaScript?

Interesting the VB.net doesn't even show up until 2010.

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