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Comment by shuoli84 | Hacker News Reader

Personal opinion: if the index is based on search, then if one language has better documentation, better ide support, less surprises, then the search count will be less and probably has a lower ranking in Tiobe.

And also, since swift's adoption domain mainly in ios development, it heavily affected by the iOS ecosystem.

My take on why objective c is higher ranked, not because it is better, but it has tons of gotchas, that people have to do heavy search to get things done.

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I think good documentation, both authoritative but also that created by active users from blogs and also Stackoverflow are what make people productive in a language and enables both newcomers and experts to progress. And of course libraries and tools are being developed, which also facilitate usage. Look for example at R, much earlier than Python it had various libraries with machine learning algorithms, at the same time the language is really "unusual", so people rather rewrote libraries from scratch in Python. At least for time series analysis I think even today there are more advanced libraries available in R. But the documentation at least some years ago was just not on par with the difficulty/unconventional ways to do things. (Despite having a super helpful tightly knit community as far as I can tell) The Python equivalents on the other hand have often more documentation than needed.

I think also JS won a lot due to good documentation, in fact there used to be an SEO campaign to boost MDN docs because the JS docs used to be so bad making people write bad code, I think the language's reputation still didn't recover from that.

Does Swift have "better documentation"? Because I've always found Apple's developer documentation a bit lacking.

It might be lacking, but there is definitely a culture within iOS of using the Apple docs for things, Apple tooling, Apple development practices, etc. It’s a much more closed ecosystem in many ways than most of the other ecosystems I’ve been exposed to (JS, Python, Ruby, even .NET in some ways).

Because of this, I wouldn’t at all be surprised if searches aren’t common because Apple provides documentation, regardless of its quality.

This is not a rank of which language is "better". It's merely about usage. I'm sure there is a lot of documentation and not that many "gotchas" in Java for that to be the reason for searches by Java developers. There are a lot of Java searches because Java is popular.

It is a rank of "Searching", not "Usage".

Every search gives us valid information about usage.

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