"The well-known Tiobe Index " [...]
Dang. I stopped reading at this point.
Dang. I stopped reading at this point.
Yes, you have reservations about the Tiobe index. So use them as an excuse to prevent you learning anything new on the subject and ignoring all reasoning that might come in an article that mentions it...
Maybe if they qualified it: "Ruby and Python are declining in use for corporate enterprise applications on the Internet." Something like that; I'd believe it. IBM's website is probably not in Django; it's probably Java with Struts or something.
The the DevOps movement alone, almost entirely based in Ruby and Python, is really expanding, and the call for programmers is increasing. Waning? Hah.
I think they're looking at overall programming, which is growing - an absolute increase in ruby/python would be a relative decline if the total is growing even faster. Make no mistake, iOS is growing very fast (iOS/android on ARM is disruptive, in its technical sense - i.e. like what PCs did to minicomputers).
That said, the common wisdom is that triobe is rubbish.
I like to see it like an index of "in which languages are we innovating" or "which projects are worth forking"
That's the very definition of "anecdotal evidence".
People working in the Smalltalk community could probably say the same, as the language was dying ("but the shops and programmers I know are doing just fine!").
The Tiobe is far from perfect, but it's better than mere anecdotal evidence. This is about trends and statistics, not something like "my project manager come in today and said he should not use Ruby anymore".