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Comment by vorg | Hacker News Reader

> the currently-popular crop of languages: Java, C, Python, C++, C#, VB.NET, JS, PHP, SQL, Objective-C, Ruby, assembly, Swift, Matlab, and Groovy, say

Did you get this list of 15 languages from TIOBE's July 2019 top 15 rankings at https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ ? It also says Apache Groovy has risen from #81 in July 2018 to #15 today. I do believe the #81 ranking but the rise to #15 only 12 months later is ludicrous. Someone's obviously spamming a search engine to get that ranking up. I know someone does the same thing with Groovy downloads from Bintray.

Now if Groovy's ranking has been fabricated over the past year, then surely some others of those languages have also been similarly fabricated for much longer, and their popularity has been exaggerated.

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> Did you get this list of 15 languages from TIOBE

Yes, I thought it would be better if it reflected TIOBE's biases instead of my own. However, I did succumb to the temptation of including the first 15 instead of the first 10, because leaving out Ruby at #11 seemed too extreme.

> Groovy … ludicrous

I was surprised to see Groovy on the list myself, because I thought it was pretty much dead. It would have displaced Golang, which is notable for its lack of metaprogramming and its departure from the Lisp memory model into something much more C-like than Java, C#, PHP, Python, or Ruby.

> surely some others of those languages have also been similarly fabricated

Yeah, likely. There's a whole SEO industry of liars trying to fake buzz. I think they're broadly correct, though.

> Groovy has risen from #81 in July 2018 to #15 today

The rise to 15 is probably not correct but 81 is probably as inaccurate the other way as 15 is today. Given how ubiquitous gradle has become and groovy being the basis of that. Especially when you consider the nature of tiobe, it is about search results, so even people migrating away from groovy will generate "groovy" traffic as they try to figure out how to do equivalent things in, say, kotlin.

> 81 is probably as inaccurate the other way as 15 is today

I can understand both how and why someone would push Apache Groovy's ranking higher up the Tiobe results, but I wouldn't know how you could push it down, let alone why anyone would. #81 is probably as accurate nowadays as the mid-40's has been for most of Groovy's life on Tiobe since 2006. Groovy's seen a significant drop in use (outside Gradle) over the past few years.

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