Java drops to #2 in TIOBE index | Hacker News Reader

Java drops to #2 in TIOBE index

theserverside.com

18 pointsvijaydev27 comments

My numbers are better than theirs: http://langpop.com - I use multiple sources. While I stand by my results, I think that they are, by their very nature, not all that precise, so making a big deal out of a blip like this is great for publicity, but probably not very meaningful.

Consider using log charts to show the differences at the lower end more precisely. This would also save screen space: you could make the bars vertical rather than horizontal.

not sure if freshmeat and google code are the all that 'authorative' about the opensource projects using languages. for one most Ruby projects are hosted on github.

I'm more interested in releases than 'hosted projects', as many of the latter are unfinished. Which is why I've always used Freshmeat rather than Sourceforge.

I agree that it's probably a bit long in the tooth, and I'd be happy to add something newer, as long as it's not too terribly biased. Which, however, I think github (and StackOverflow) continue to be: the former in favor of Ruby, the latter in favor of various Microsoft things.

well, the best thing might be to just combine all the project listings you can pull from all the sites together. for what it worth you can try to only pull recent projects, or projects passing some minimal threshold of 'usage' like download count on sf or watch/fork count on github. but w/o counting the github you are severely undercounting ruby projects. the ones on google code and freshmeat are a statistical aberration to the real count :) ruby people just don't care enough about freashmeat to use it much. all that matters is really just on the github. 'releases' announced on blogs/mailing lists and by releasing new version of a 'gem'. no need to duplicate it on some horrible 'releases' site still stuck in the 90-s :). rubygems package manager does a great job of informing people of new versions.

Thanks for the additional data.

If you don't mind a suggestion, having the combined index at the top, with details below, would probably be more attractive.

The large logo with vertical color bars also creates an expectation that the monochromatic horizontal bars end up disappointing ...

I strongly agree that the normalized/aggregated results should be at the top. The first graph confused the hell out of me (like erlanger, I thought "D? Seriously?").

Think of it as putting an executive summary at the start of an article or paper.

For all this bluster, D seems awfully high on that list (above ActionScript and Objective-C? really?).

I guess ableal is right. You need to be looking at the normalized results, further down the page.

Ah, that makes sense, I didn't read and assumed that the first chart was the summary.

Is it cause for concern, or just a statistically insignificant blip?

It seems obvious to me that it is neither. Even among java programmers, a miniscule fall that brought it a tiny bit below another language that isn't generally used for the same things as Java is totally unimportant. Not to mention other JVM languages are climbing up the rankings. And it's not very sound as a basis for what languages are important.

And it's definitely not a blip. Java's been going down for years in the TIOBE rankings.

Seriously? Go outranks action script? This list is flawed.

I'm suspicious of their sources when Delphi outranks Javascript as well...

The claim is that Java is losing ground to other languages that use the JVM yet very few in the top-50 rely on the JVM. JavaFX is cited but it's only "approaching" the top-20.

I am only surprised it's second to C.

Quoting from http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....: "The scores for C have been pretty constant through the years, varying between the 15% and 20% market share for almost 10 years. So the main reason for C's number 1 position is not C's uprise, but the decline of its competitor Java."

If you look at the list, Objective-C has also jumped up 31 spots since last April. I'm wondering if a shift toward development for mobile devices (iPhone and otherwise) has caused C to leapfrog Java.

> iPhone and otherwise

Objective-C is not particularly useful for any other mobile platform that's not Apple's

"otherwise" as ipad, ipod touch...

Consider what that means: at one time Java was THE way to do mobile phone apps.

Java is still more or less the way to do mobile for anything non-Apple.

It's true, specially for games, but there is a significant shift towards JavaScript for non-demanding apps and widgets.

I noticed the Objective-C jump too. Action script is still at the bottom of the list too. Interesting to me is Ruby. I would have thought that would be near the top. All you hear now is Ruby, Ruby, Ruby...

It's because us Ruby developers have a nice tool stack and discoverable APIs such that we don't have to search Google!

In all seriousness, though, I agree. The anecdotal evidence that I have is that Ruby (and Javascript) are getting to be more popular. That may just be with the crowd I hang out with though.

I get the feeling that C and C++ are undergoing a mini-renaissance right now. This is a good thing.

The high level language / low-level language thing is one of the "cycles of reincarnation" in software.

I do sometimes wonder... if we spent our time cleaning up the C/C++ ecosystem instead of recoding everything in the newest language of the month, would we get further with that?

I noticed the delta from #1 to #2 is 0.007%, i.e. in the 4th significant digit if you round.

(I suppose that if a C programmer had the flu for a couple of weeks, it would be a tie ...)

It's the new COBOL!

It doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, I think one of the worst reasons to use a particular language is because of it's popularity. Java did a lot of great things but I think its time has passed.

The codebase that is out there makes it difficult to make any significant changes to the language. (eg. generics)

It's lagging because its popularity makes any revolutionary changes impractical to enterprise customers (eg. Oracle). I actually think that Oracle may piss the community off enough that the open source forks of java start making improvements to the language. (eg. MySQL)

New language features are being added to JVM based languages such as scala and clojure instead. This allows new ideas (i realize these are old ideas from a LISP perspective) to florish and reuse the extensive codebase.

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