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The TIOBE index says Perl is currently the #11 most popular programming language (up from #30 a year ago). ref: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

Now, I don't actually believe this, because that puts Perl way ahead of Rust (currently at #18). So the big thing I'm taking away from this little research post is that I no longer trust the Tiobe index. Too bad - it felt pretty reliable for a long time.

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Which is more believable or surprising:

a) there is probably several orders of magnitude more Perl code running out there in the wild than Rust?

b) the TIOBE index was ever meaningful?

I'm sure (a) is true. But TIOBE is supposed to be some balance between "total mass of existing code" and "current interest in new code".

I suggest that there are no meaningful conclusions to be gleaned from the TIOBE rankings.

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