
TIOBE declares Python as programming language of 2007 - szferi
http://www.tiobe.com/index.htm?tiobe_index?2007
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bootload
_"... The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the
popularity of programming languages ... TIOBE declares Python as programming
language of 2007! ..."_

Ho hum. Python has been a pretty useful language for a lot longer than the
title suggests. [0] Is it just me or do lists like this one reek and makes me
think this is the kind of _"language-popularity"_ graphy PHB"'s look at to
start new projects.

Read _"Being popular"_ [1] to gain a different perspective on how language
popularity has nothing to do with how useful a language is to hackers.

[0] Here is the graph of popularity ~
<http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index/Python.html> At what stage did google
decided to adopt python?

[1] <http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html>

~~~
davidw
Well... good hackers are certainly good hackers with any language, but I
wouldn't go so far as to say that popularity doesn't matter at all. Even
hackers like to have handy libs, and those are more likely to exist for more
things, the more people use the language.

That said, this is old news in any case, and my own site,
<http://www.langpop.com> does a better job of aggregating more data sources:-)

~~~
bootload
_"... Even hackers like to have handy libs, and those are more likely to exist
for more things, the more people use the language. ..."_

That could explain the popularity of 'c'. Something written in 'c' can be used
just about everywhere. One of the reasons I despise Java & C#. Not because
they are bad languages. Because they don't share very well.

 _"... That said, this is old news in any case, and my own
site,<http://www.langpop.com> does a better job of aggregating more data
sources:-) ..."_

Looks like your have been thinking about this a lot deeper. Do you supply the
data? One other minor quibble the x-axes graph titles are hard to read. What
graphing lib are you using?

~~~
davidw
> Looks like your have been thinking about this a lot deeper

I'm fascinated by it:

[http://www.welton.it/articles/programming_language_economics...](http://www.welton.it/articles/programming_language_economics.html)

<http://www.welton.it/articles/scalable_systems.html>

I get the data from Yahoo search (the open API is better than Google's, which
doesn't exist any more) and direct scraping in some cases.

The graphing lib is Plotr, and yeah, it's getting too scrunched up, and I need
to add some history functions, because I have a few months of data. Not much
has really changed, but still, it's nice to show it.

