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Comment by Cybiote | Hacker News Reader

It was interesting to observe that since this was written, both F# (from 67 to 32) and Lisp (63 to 29) have risen dramatically on the TIOBE index. Haskell has also risen from 42 to 39, though not as big a gain as the other two. Haskell now ranks above Apex while PL/I has fallen below the top 50, where Erlang has remained. I must live in a bubble since I was surprised to see TypeScript and Julia rank so low.

It's amusing from a trivia point of view but I don't think such a ranking should figure in any serious decision on what language to use.

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> It was interesting to observe that since this was written, both F# (from 67 to 32) and Lisp (63 to 29) have risen dramatically on the TIOBE index.

The TIOBE index is pretty much meaningless for any language below the #5 spot, under which the percentages are so infinitesimal that the ordering is completely useless.

For example, a jump from 63 to 29 means the market share for Lisp went from to 0.12% to 0.37%, and I suspect the error margin is several times that delta.

That's a great point. I also observed that and the fact ratings seem fairly volatile outside the top 10. I was only noting positional changes of the languages mentioned in the article over time.

Its main point of other reasons to to choose a language than popularity is well taken but I do not thinking making using of the TIOBE index as it does argues this well.

There was a post last year [1] pondering about the tiobe methodology of "x programming" in the context of Julia, since the most common way to search for it is "julia language" instead. Adding that option makes both Julia and Typescript rise apparently.

[1] https://juliacomputing.com/blog/2019/09/16/tiobe-blog.html

Typescript ranking so low compared to other languages just shows how flawed that index is.

Is there a different index? Where are you getting your data?

There is both the Redmonk index (updated biannually, uses data from GitHub and StackOverflow): https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2020/02/28/language-rankings-1-2...

And the PYPL index (updated monthly, uses data from Google Trends, which counts search queries): http://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html

I regard both of these more accurate indicators of popularity than the TIOBE index. (As for PYPL vs. TIOBE, I find that search queries reflect popularity more accurately than search results)

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