The Tiobe index is not a reliable indicator of anything; their methodology is extremely noisy. A fractional percentage drop is meaningless.
https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/javascript/
Javascript in 2019 only has 0.5% more market share than in 2004?
2019 has basically every new UI (and many rewrites of old ones) being built in Javascript, 2004 it was being used for the occasional drop down menu.
(Even if you include Typescript, the only compile-to-JS language in the top 50, it still only gets to 2.7% today compared to 2% in 2004).
See also C unassailably at number 2. I think we can all agree that in 2019, there is more active development in Javascript, than C - Likely it's benefiting from their methodology giving it credit for C++ and C#, so at least we can theorise about that one, but I really have no idea for Javascript.
Lots of developers use Javascript in the course of their work. Few of them will refer to their work as "Javascript programming" -- they will typically use either a broader term, like "web development", or a more specific one, like "React development". Neither of these would influence TIOBE's rankings.
I’m using DDG bangs to reduce the noise from the start and take me straight to a site specific result : `!mdn function apply` or eg `!php preg_split`.
yeah... no
> See also C unassailably at number 2. I think we can all agree that in 2019, there is more active development in Javascript, than C
bubbles, bubbles, bubbles. the immense majority of large companies I see start new GUI projects in Java, C#, C++, ... daily. Count the hundred of thousands of programmers working for gigacompanies like Samsung (with more than 40k devs), ATOS (122K employees, mostly devs), CapGemini (211k employees, mostly devs), etc... they are far from all doing JS.
Listen kids. A colossal amount of the software engineering that takes place on this earth is paid development for closed source apps and services. It's not on GitHub. It's not written in JavaScript. It's not done on Node.js. A great deal of it doesn't happen in California. And it dwarfs the amount of software on GitHub or GitLab.
It happens in Java and C++ and C# and Visual Basic and other not-sexy languages and involves writing crappy enterprise interfaces and tons of backend code.
The great thing about TIOBE is its a good indicator of what jobs are being hired for. That's why it doesn't match whatever trendy expectations most people expect to see in a languages ranking. That's why Visual Basic is always ranked so highly. Because the actual world of paid software engineering and your mental view of that world are wildly different.
Personally I think TIOBE is very valuable for what it's for. I tell young developers to use its top 10 list as a guide for where to invest your time IF you're taking a "safe" approach to career skills and employability. If you use one of the other guides for that, you may decide that learning new and exciting languages might be optimal for employment. Generally speaking that's not the case.
If one wants filter bubble expectations met, I recommend sticking to language rankings that are solely based on GitHub and other publicly available source code.
Clojure is right next to it on the list. It’s not only compile-to-JS but 100% of the people I know using it use it that way.
There are a couple of really strange comparisons you can spot in the results. For example, Scratch -- a visual programming language made for children which is only usable on its own web site -- is ranked higher than TypeScript, Lua, Scala, Kotlin, or Rust. Similarly, D -- a proposed replacement for C++ which has never found any real traction -- is ranked even higher.
Anyhow, regardless, the point is TIBOE is measuring some meaningless stuff.
There’s not really any defending it; it’s just some arbitrary metrics about languages, not really worth paying attention to particularly...
It isn't a measure of popularity - its a measure of which languages either intentionally or accidentally have the best SEO.
Here's what they say about their methodology:
> The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. It is important to note that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.
> Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings.
Bing and Yahoo! are both front ends to the same search engine. Wikipedia, Amazon, and YouTube aren't general-purpose search engines at all, and it's unclear how accurate the results of a Baidu search would be for English-language search terms like "Javascript programming".
The best measure of a language's popularity needs to take job vacancies and github metrics as their most meaningful measures. Stackoverflow posts and google searches will help too but contain a lot of natural bias.
Outside of iOS I don’t think it’s made a dent and I would be surprised if things like Swift for Tensorflow make a difference there (if only because the number of ML devs is very small and the appeal of Swift for ML is also pretty small).