Rust is in TIOBE Index top 10 | Hacker News Reader

Rust is in TIOBE Index top 10

tiobe.com

22 pointszdkaster18 comments

Now remind me of every time you said Tiobe didn't matter when we pointed out Rust wasn't in the top 10 :)

I'm more interested in that massive collapse in python over the past year. Is it due to everyone running for the doors just before the AI bubble pops? Or did AI make rewriting everything Python into Rust a reality perhaps?

Exactly! Often, it's that TIOBE doesn't count, if their favorite language is not doing well or goes down in the rankings. Then, if their language moves up in the rankings, it is time to shout from the rooftops to tell everyone to go look how well they're doing on TIOBE.

What's more interesting is Visual Basic is ranked as #7 and I couldn't get my head around why this is the case, lol.

> I couldn't get my head around why this is the case, lol.

Because TIOBE's methodology is terrible, and always has been.

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programminglanguages_defin...

It's literally based on the (estimated) number of search engine hits for e.g. "Python programming" on Google and a handful of site-specific search engines (e.g. Amazon, eBay, Walmart, microsoft.com, etc), with some manually applied tweaks for languages with easily confusable names. Many of the fluctuations in rankings - like the big dip in the ranking for C between 2015 and 2018 - probably have more to do with changes in search engine algorithms than any real change in popularity.

https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2026/04/14/language-rankings-1-2...

This is usually considered a better ranking. This has Rust at #20.

Oh, thanks for the info. That's suprisingly a weird index to measure usage popularity...

Scratch at #12 is even stranger. It's not even a programming language.

It makes sense, in terms of general usage and popularity, but not in terms of most requested for the job market or having the most legacy code.

Different rankings measure different things, so it depends on what and how people want to assess languages and usage.

It's sort of a programming language. But not a particularly general-purpose one.

It wouldn't surprise me if I learned that the vast majority of programming globally is in languages like Visual Basic or PHP that are utterly unfashionable on a board like this, but still make the world go round.

It's a bit hard to comprehend that's reality to be honest. But I could see that it could be the case from the fact that old industrial factories or old corporates would still run with what works for them.

The chart shows python really surged in popularity in the 2020s. I suppose the change is surge is from AI/ML really heating up for a few years, and is now starting to cool off.

RIP Object Pascal, the Python of your day, except much faster and much more readable.

The funny or strange thing about people claiming Object Pascal is dead, is they have been doing so for at least the last 20 years. It got so crazy and reckless, that people were claiming the actor, Pedro Pascal, was dead too.

Yet, despite all this hoping for Pascal (the language) to die, Embarcadero keeps making money selling Delphi (dialect of Object Pascal). Not to mention, their being all kinds of various other dialects in use: Free Pascal, PascalABC.NET, Oxygene, Blaise (brand new compiler)[1], etc...

[1]: https://github.com/graemeg/blaise

I'm specifically referring to Rust kicking Pascal out of the top ten, as per the article.

Don't forget Lazarus, bringing the rest of the capabilities of Delhi to the Free Pascal compiler, while also being self aware of the Pascal-is-dead joke.

> RIP Object Pascal

Why? It's still there and gets even regular maintenance.

Rust entered the top ten, at the expense of Pascal. I'd still recommend Pascal over Python, but it'll probably never be in the top ten again.

I wouldn't worry about that. Tiobe simply measures how many search queries are made for some terms supposed to represent a programming language, and even that process is still inaccurate (e.g. because of ambiguity with other uses of the same terms). The result says nothing about how widely the language in question is actually used. There is no reason to assume a correlation between effective prevalence and the number of searches. Experienced developers are unlikely to enter the terms used by Tiobe into a search engine, and since most people are now working with LLMs, this measurement method is obsolete even more.

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