C Rival 'Zig' Cracks Tiobe Index Top 50 | Hacker News Reader

C Rival 'Zig' Cracks Tiobe Index Top 50

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45 pointsAlifatisk28 comments

I don't know why people put any stock in this index, the methodology seems flawed. They say that Ada's rating is double that of TypeScript, surely that doesn't reflect reality in the slightest?

Tons of folks in industry use Ada, they just don't talk about it much (or are forbidden). Ada is the darling of USDOD, so there's untold LoC in missiles, fighter jets, and spy satellites.

Based on what I understand of the rating methodology, though, I'm still very surprised that Ada beats TypeScript. My understanding is that it's basically a measure of search results, and I would expect TypeScript to have vastly more of those than Ada, given that most Ada applications aren't going to be publicly discussed.

I suspect that it has to do with names—Ada is highly overloaded in ways that are adjacent to programming (ADA, Ada Lovelace) and is a short enough word that Google may ignore it. A naive search for `ada programming` turns up 896 million results, compared to 28 million for `typescript programming`

Exactly, Ada is searched for 2x as much as TS? No way.

Yup i did some Ada work in a lockheed internship in college. Was for various things on a plane being sold to another country. Not classified but plenty of things around me were (of course nobody gave me any classified information but everybody walked around with their clearance level on their employee badge and the broad strokes of what other programs were isn’t classified, for example lots of F-35 work was being done in the building)

Isn't the F-35 also famous for the fact that they used C++ (instead of Ada) for the software?

Although my intuition would seem to agree with you, Ada is still heavily used in industries where programming errors are fatal like avionics, medical devices, military, space, automotive. None of these industries typically like to operate in public view so I believe there is a reasonable argument that Ada may even be underrepresented in most indexes.

TIOBE has always been flawed; it doesn't claim to be perfect. It's an interesting metric, and deeply unpopular languages don't make the cut. Once-popular Pascal has been plummeting in recent years. That said, their chart has a particularly unsettling feature: the SQL line is dead flat from early 2004 to 2018.

Yeah...I think you'd expect it to grow a good bit during that time frame, unless it's heavily normalized somehow.

I don't know what is the methodology behind the TIOBE rating but what is clear is that a lot of stuff happens below the radar of the average silicon valley dev.

Most software is not user facing.

The TIOBE index is effectively just based on the number of estimated hits for "$LANGUAGE programming" on Google. That's it. It's not based on actual usage, or interest, and certainly not importance; it's just counting search results.

(They actually search on a few sites other than Google, but they're bizarrely chosen -- they include search hits on Walmart and Etsy, for example. And the way they weight search results effectively means that the wildly inflated Google search result counts dominate the ranking.)

Honestly I think this entry is not very interesting. It's not even a link to the thing itself, but rather to another webiste with (mostly low-quality) comments, neither of which IMO should be deserving of the front page.

Oh, how the mighty Slashdot has fallen!

Some background on these ratings, quoted directly from their website:

> TIOBE Software BV was founded the 1st of October 2000 by Paul Jansen. The name TIOBE stands for “The Importance Of Being Earnest”.

> Since there are many questions about the way the TIOBE index is assembled, a special page is devoted to its definition. Basically the calculation comes down to counting hits for the search query +"<language> programming"

> Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings.

> Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings.

This bit is partially inaccurate. They don't actually use Baidu, Yahoo, or YouTube because they can't parse a count of search results from those sites' search pages.

They do, however, include the number of hits for "<language> programming" on the Amazon search page... as well as on eBay, microsoft.com (i.e. Microsoft's support pages), Walmart, and Etsy.

Missing number from headline: 50

"'Zig' Cracks Tiobe Index Top 50"

(it was #46)

Note, take Tiobes index with a grain of salt!

At the same time of all program language indexes, I always thought of it as the most lagging or most established.

For example

  11. Delphi/Object Pascal
  12. Assembly language
  13. Classic Visual Basic (not even sure, 'regular' VB at #6)

The top modern, non-ubiquitous language on the list is 19. Rust.

For Zig to make #46 counts for some kind of exposure and momentum.

More like a barrel of salt.

I know the Tiobe Index is flawed, but has anyone come up with a better solution?

I would say the IEEE, RedMonk, StackOverflow, JetBrains, PYPL and Github rankings are all better than Tiobe, although they aren't perfect either. Which is better really comes down to what you're looking for.

Job listing based metrics are much better, though still not perfect.

What difference would it make. Does anybody really care? Does anybody remember the list after they leave this page?

Daily reminder that TIOBE is beyond useless.

Can we instead use something like sport leagues do, get some cute animal and make a ranking based on its decisions? That would be much more accurate.

You are being needlessly dismissive. TIOBE has uses, especially comparing trends within a language.

And Ruby is about to drop off Top 20. There are a lot of Rails developers, DHH included are ( or were ) still in denial.

It may not be dying, but it is definitely shrinking.

The trend is slowing for sure, It might be because other languages is raising and schools are not teaching Ruby anymore.

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