Ruby drops out of 10 most used languages | Hacker News Reader

Ruby drops out of 10 most used languages

tiobe.com

25 pointsAdamN28 comments

The ratings are largely based on number of hits from search engines using the query +"<language> programming". This seems largely biased towards older languages. You can read more about it here: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/tpci_d...

I'm not sure how useful this data really is. I should create a language called "game" - then it could probably make it to #3.

Also note that if this is done by hits, that it is no wonder objective-c has such a high jump.

I've been programming in C/C++ for a decade and objective-c still confused the crap out of me for my first iPhone app.

What tripped you up the most?

I just re-re-learned it, and:

* How to handle type 'id'

* Formal protocols (informal protocols I get just fine)

* Autorelease

I'm learning it now, and although nothing is confusing me yet, the un-named first argument to each method is a pretty amazing wart. The designers never saw "nameOfMethodWithFirstArgument:(Type )arg1 secondArgument:(Type )arg2" and decided to rethink things? Why not?

You can go unnamed for all your arguments, no need to feel the first one is being left out. [object method:1 :2 :3] is valid. =)

On the other hand, Objective-C encourages verbosity, and in well-defined methods, I have a hard time considering calling the first argument unnamed.

How would you design it?

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but why not nameOfMethod: firstArgName(Type '')arg1 secondArgName(Type )arg2? So you'd get invocations like this:

point = createPoint: x:10 y:15;

Instead of this:

point = createPointWithX:10 y:15;

edit: no idea how to get asterisks to appear, so pretend I have pointer symbols where appropriate.

For being a "C" language I found it an abomination of syntax. For being a "C" langauge I found the memory management confusing - I new, I release - you do everything or nothing, not some things sometimes and nothing other times. Don't make me check the documentation to know if something is autoreleased.

Beyond those initial frustrations - the thing I liked about it the most is I could seamlessly call out to my C/CPP files and work in a non-proprietary language. You know objective-c? Awesome, but what about other platforms?

Delphi is #9?!? This does not make sense to me. And Go is #15? Are people actually using Go? This seems a little implausible.

No kidding. Did you notice the drop in usage of JavaScript? I highly doubt that this is the case. If anything I would have expected its usage to go up.

I've wondered about that for a long time. Delphi has been high on the TIOBE index for years, but no one ever talks about it. Maybe it's only used for incredibly boring projects at gigantic companies?

I am using Delphi 5 and 6 on daily basis maintaining some very very old and mega boring projects.

There is a lot of crap (and some good) software written in this language and IDE around medium sized companies.

... but nonetheless they are useful projects that probably helped the business to make money ...

And Pascal?

No lisp?

I'm just going to leave this here: http://langpop.com/

Thanks:-)

What's more, you'll never catch me making these silly statements about how Visual Forth ++ has surpassed ActionCobol 3.0 in April 2012 or things like that.

I stand by my results and think they're broadly accurate, but it's silly to make statements like they do - "Ruby drops out of top 10" - because there's just too much fuzz involved. I guess it makes sense for them because it gets them lots of traffic:-/

Freshmeat and Google Code, but no GitHub?

Not yet. It's still way too Ruby heavy to be a good source of information. I'll probably give it another year or two to let things even out and then throw it on, maybe with StackOverflow, which will hopefully undergo the same process of broadening out from their initial community of .Net people.

    It's still way too Ruby heavy to be a good source of information.

However, since Ruby projects are overwhelmingly (almost exclusively) hosted on Github, excluding it suggests that Ruby is underrepresented.

Google code search looks at github too, actually.

It's actually much flatter than you'd think: http://github.com/languages

Ruby being more popular than anything else flies in the face of all the other metrics. There's no way it's more popular, in general, than PHP and Java, for instance.

Interesting. Python has a bigger drop in percentage, second only to VB.

Just to note, article's main point (that C surpassed Java) also happened previously in 2004-2005 as well, at least according to this Tiobe graph from Wikipedia (cum grano salis):

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d3/Tiobe_index.pn...

Go used more than ActionScript? What the?

You can google for ActionScript without 'programming,' but not so for Go. I think that explains its outlier status.

I'm not totally surprised about Ruby becoming less important - more people are moving to iPhone/iPad development and existing infrastructures (i.e. PHP) are staying static.

I didn't downvote you, but I'll point out that the actual percentage decline for Ruby is very small (-0.35%), less than the declines of Python, Java, C++ and Javascript, and almost the same as PHP. The percentage rise of Objective-C (2.15%) is far higher than what could have come from Ruby.

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