Rated at position #34 (after Scratch) is Scala really important? | Hacker News Reader

Rated at position #34 (after Scratch) is Scala really important?

tiobe.com

2 pointsziodave8 comments

Interesting to see how popular languages really are outside the HN bubble. Scala has always been fairly niche (I believe Twitter was soley responsibly in bringing it the lime light) its also cool to see that Go which has been riding the hype train this month ranks below Dart, Coldfusion, and Visual FoxPro.

In the HN bubble one might ask "is Perl really important", which came in at #9.

TL;DR: TIOBE is a horrible way to decide if something is important.

TIOBE is a fun conversation generator, but hardly anything to be taken seriously. In 2004, when Google swapped an algorithm, a bunch of TIOBE "rankings" swung massively. Back then they only used Google (the rankings are generated from search engine results, more results == better). Now they use multiple engines, but the list of issues that make it crap persist.

- Older languages like perl, have years of postings and pages to draw from ... even if many of them are wrong with current perl. - Better documented languages generate less noise in terms of pages - Languages with a higher base engineer level (lisp) tend to generate less pages of noise - The system is very easily gamed by anyone with the motivation (not sure if anyone cares) - Communities that rally around good answers rather than repeat themselves generate less noise

Noise == Google Results == Rank

IMO the [RedMonk ranking](1) which is a plot of Stackoverflow vs GitHub popularity is more relevant.

[1]: http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2013/02/28/language-rankings-1-13...

For those who don't know what Scratch is: "Scratch is designed especially for ages 8 to 16, but is used by people of all ages. Millions of people are creating Scratch projects in a wide variety of settings, including homes, schools, museums, libraries, and community centers."

I would rather ask "is tiobe really important". To that question I would answer "No."

Is Scratch being used at Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, FourSquare, Simple, and many others?

I want to offer a better metric: Scala is number 15 on GitHub.

Answering the question: Yes, it is.

- Scala is bringing the best combination of functional and OO programming to the masses.

- New languages out there are asked "how do you improve on Scala?", which is a huge change, considering that a few years ago Java was the main comparison target.

- Languages like Java or C# are adopting improvements from Scala, which shows that Scala seems to have done a lot things right.

The explanation of the bad rating on Tiobe is the search string being used by Tiobe:

Tiobe searches for phrases like "$LANG programming", but in Scala (and Haskell) the phrase "programming in $LANG" is much more common. Therefore, both languages suffer from a bad rating. People at Tiobe are aware of it, but it seems as if they don't plan to fix it.

Some other language communities started to modify their websites to cheat the index. For example, the Delphi community went through all their documentation and blog and modified existing texts to read "Delphi programming" and gained a few positions afterwards.

Further info: http://blog.timbunce.org/2009/05/17/tiobe-index-is-being-gam...

Thanks, this deserves an submit on its own in HN :-)

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