Comment by Mithaldu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mithaldu | Hacker News Reader

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In the spirit of keeping this in good taste, i'll try to phrase this nicely: Please refrain from referring to TIOBE. Popularity contests are not the best measure for anything from the start, however TIOBE manages to step beyond that failing by employing a known-broken algorithm to generate their results. This algorithm is described on their own site, with the faultiness stemming from the simple fact that results are skewed towards languages with shorter names, or names that overlap heavily with real-world objects:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/tpci_d...

So please, do not even acknowledge them.

Edit: Also, after browsing around a bit on your website, i can't tell what Parse is. At all. It seems to be some kind of VPS provider, but not. Maybe a mix of all the Amazon remote services? For cellphone apps?

Lastly, your website doesn't handle browsers with increased minimum font sizes (something that is amazing for people with bad eyes) very gracefully. The priving page displays the most obvious styling brokenness, with the slider bar having two rows, and the background jobs counter being offset downwards by one row.

Parse is a collection of backend services designed to make mobile app development easier. It provides things like cloud storage, authentication, social network integration, push services and analytics.

Parse was also acquired by Facebook for $85M in 2013.

They should hire you to write all their copy. Thanks for explaining. :)

> In the spirit of keeping this in good taste, i'll try to phrase this nicely:

TIOBE isn't great, but at least you know what their algorithm is, and it is certainly not worth implying you would normally _not_ be nice to someone for referencing it.

> it is certainly not worth implying its worth _not_ being nice to someone about it for referencing it.

That is just you reading things into that which i did not mean to imply at all. ;)

I have strong things to say about TIOBE, which could be expressed with extreme accuracy in a very concise manner, and match reality with no deviation. However to do so would be considered impolite by many who have not yet delved into the details of what TIOBE does. As such the above is my attempt to do so politely, sacrificing some accuracy.

As you showed me with your lead though, i seem to have already lost a massive amount of accuracy.

> TIOBE isn't great, but at least you know what their algorithm is

That property is not helpful when they themselves are unwilling to warn readers about the brokenness of their algorithm, and their definition also does not make this obvious. In fact, TIOBE happily publishes their "results" as facts and many people believe them.

What's a good alternative then?

Sites that measure trends in jobs offered for example are both much more accurate AND useful to the general public. One that i know of is http://indeed.com

>In the spirit of keeping this in good taste, i'll try to phrase this nicely: Please refrain from referring to TIOBE

I can see from your green user name that you are a new user. HN does not look kindly on that kind of snarkiness you are putting in that comment and it is likely that whatever else you say will be ignore just because of that.

I recommand you rephrase such a statement to be more neutral in the future - you might actually get people to consider your complaint then.

Mithaldu's account is over 1700 days old.

I appreciate your comment, mainly because english is not my native language, and i was not even aware that that phrasing could come across as snarky. It was certainly not intended as snarky. Maybe some cultural disconnect.

How would i phrase that more neutrally?

(No idea why my name would show green to you, maybe because the post is still editable or something.)

"In the spirit of keeping this in good taste, i'll try to phrase this nicely" creates the impression that you would really rather say something nasty, because that would be the correct thing, but instead you don't do this to be 'nice'. Basically, your original sentence, to a 'native' speaker, comes across as the opposite: "TIOBE index is really bad and I'd like to chastise you for bringing it up."

If you truly don't mean to be snarky, a better approach might be: "from what I can tell (implying that you are not certain) the TIOBE index is not a good measure. Here's why I think this is the case:"

    Here lies
    the spirit of good taste
    peperony and chease

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