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Comment by andrewstuart2 | Hacker News Reader

Haha maybe it's just the HN effect but I was very surprised to see Java at ~20%, having increased ~5% over the last year (I guess Android is Java, though).

That, and the facts that Rust is ahead of Go, and that the two of them sit at only ~0.4% usage combined.

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Yeah, some of that stuff just doesn't seem realistic. Look at some of the languages that are ahead of Scala for example, and note that Clojure isn't even in the top 50 right now. That seems like a real stretch to me.

I mean, you have D WAY ahead of Clojure? Seriously? Not to knock D, or @walterbright, but does anybody buy that D has significantly more industry adoption than Clojure does?

Hey, maybe I'm wrong, or maybe it is the "HN effect", but that's why I say that I consider the Tiobe Index "suspect". For the top 10 or so, it's probably a decent approximation, but beyond that I think it's highly, highly questionable.

You might need to rebase your assumptions. Big banking, big governments, big everything is big and use a lot of Java I guess.

Android adds to the top of that.

You might need to rebase your assumptions. Big banking, big governments, big everything is big and use a lot of Java I guess.

I don't get what you're saying. I didn't say anything about Java being on top, except to specifically say that Tiobe is probably a reasonable approximation near the top. It's the "long tail" that I think gets especially hinky.

I guess I misread you as supporting andrewstuart2 and I'm sorry for that.

I have however not downvoted you, so if anyone did it was somebody else.

(btw: seems I've crossed some magical threshold and people seems to be upvoting almost anything I write now. Might be time to create a new account, again :-P)

> Not to knock D, or @walterbright, but does anybody buy that D has significantly more industry adoption than Clojure does?

Yes. D has a very clear use case and makes sense for it (and didn't have a lot of competition there until the rise of Rust). Clojure has a lot of (often vocal) fans but in practice the compelling case over the more popular Scala just isn't there - at least that's what I've seen in multiple-languages-but-JVM shops (biased by the fact that I'm a Scala programmer myself). You'd get a few Clojure fans who would talk the language up, but nothing in actual use.

I dunno... I never hear of anybody using "D" other than Facebook. In fact, I never hear D mentioned at all except here on HN. OTOH, I know people actually using Clojure in industry. There also seems to be more Clojure activity on Github, which I take as something of a proxy for interest in the language.

Of course, my view may be tainted by the fact that I live very near Relevance and know and interact with a few of the Relevance people.

Anyway, this isn't specifically about D or Clojure. I just generally think that the long tail of the Tiobe index looks pretty fishy at times.

Though Clojure fans like various aspects of the language, Clojure's use case is being a Java replacement (or else integrating very well with Java) in non-free-software enterprise shops, specifically for when you need multithreading while working on large amounts of data.

And for exactly that use case, there is industry adoption.

But Scala has better Java integration, and is very good at working with large amounts of data. (Also the space where you need multithreading but not distribution is extremely narrow, and when you go distributed Spark is fantastic).

COBOL and Fortran usage more than triples Rust and Go usage.

Just to put things in perspective a bit further.

I can actually see that as being real. There is a lot of legacy code out there (especially in larger corporations) and, while these languages are rarely featured in the news, many people are required to use them at work.

I know someone whose job is to maintain COBOL code for the State of Texas. Government organizations have even more difficulty upgrading IT infrastructure than large corporations do, and there are a lot more of them that can survive a lot longer than there are large corporations.

A friend of mine uses FORTRAN for a physics lab data analysis

Java's increase is most likely due to Android.

It's the defacto language to learn at the university level. And many large companies use it on the backend (Google and Amazon). Small companies who outsource to cheap labor overseas will probably have their work done in Java on the server-side (though this is changing).

Not surprising at all to me.

Go may be recognized in the Valley. But it doesn't have much usage outside the startup world (and Google). And only a portion of startups here use it too.

Still a great language though.

The surprise would be its comparison to Rust. I've seen job listings involving Go, but not Rust.

Yeah, good point.

I believe TIOBE is heavily weighted towards search terms, not job listings though.

Possibly its biased towards more articles?

Go is a simpler language thats not evolving as quickly as rust is and the hype has started to wear off.

I was surprised to see Swift above Obj-C.

It happened in December of last year.

http://www.infoq.com/news/2016/01/swift-overtakes-objective-...

Swift is the de-facto future replacement of Objective-C for Apple ecosystem. It's got a while to go yet - a stable ABI for one - but once that happens (with Swift 3 later this year) then you'll start to see it take off. Plus, since it was open sourced it has been made to run on Linux and Raspberry Pi devices and has attracted a hugely varied and vocal community.

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