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On StackOverflow, Lua has barely 1.1K questions, while JavaScript has over 100K questions. As a point of comparison, Clojure has 1.6K. The Tiobe method seems flawed.

http://stackoverflow.com/tags

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The index is basically defined as Google for "<language> programming" then massage the numbers via hand waving and "false positive detection." It's a silly way to measure programming language popularity given all the possible alternatives.

My guess is that their "false positive detection" is penalizing Javascript more than anything. I can understand Lua being #10, but Javascript being #11 is preposterous.

Perhaps the people using JavaScript are the more likely the kinds of people to go asking more questions.

Or JavaScript is the kind of language that requires a lot of question-asking to accomplish anything significant (poor language design/documentation).

I'm not sure that I would frame it that way, but I think that is more or less correct. Lua is such a small language that you generally don't need to ask questions before you do stuff.

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