

Ruby drops out of 10 most used languages - AdamN
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

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ryanelkins
The ratings are largely based on number of hits from search engines using the
query +"<language> programming". This seems largely biased towards older
languages. You can read more about it here:
[http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/tpci_d...](http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/tpci_definition.htm)

I'm not sure how useful this data really is. I should create a language called
"game" - then it could probably make it to #3.

~~~
alttab
Also note that if this is done by hits, that it is no wonder objective-c has
such a high jump.

I've been programming in C/C++ for a decade and objective-c still confused the
crap out of me for my first iPhone app.

~~~
tptacek
What tripped you up the most?

I just re-re-learned it, and:

* How to handle type 'id'

* Formal protocols (informal protocols I get just fine)

* Autorelease

~~~
iron_ball
I'm learning it now, and although nothing is confusing me yet, the un-named
first argument to each method is a pretty amazing wart. The designers never
saw "nameOfMethodWithFirstArgument:(Type _)arg1 secondArgument:(Type_ )arg2"
and decided to rethink things? Why not?

~~~
yan
How would you design it?

~~~
iron_ball
Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but why not nameOfMethod:
firstArgName(Type ' _')arg1 secondArgName(Type_ )arg2? So you'd get
invocations like this:

point = createPoint: x:10 y:15;

Instead of this:

point = createPointWithX:10 y:15;

edit: no idea how to get asterisks to appear, so pretend I have pointer
symbols where appropriate.

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ianb
Delphi is #9?!? This does not make sense to me. And Go is #15? Are people
actually _using_ Go? This seems a little implausible.

~~~
ggchappell
I've wondered about that for a long time. Delphi has been high on the TIOBE
index for years, but no one ever talks about it. Maybe it's only used for
incredibly boring projects at gigantic companies?

~~~
dejv
I am using Delphi 5 and 6 on daily basis maintaining some very very old and
mega boring projects.

There is a lot of crap (and some good) software written in this language and
IDE around medium sized companies.

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acangiano
I'm just going to leave this here: <http://langpop.com/>

~~~
steveklabnik
Freshmeat and Google Code, but no GitHub?

~~~
davidw
Not yet. It's still way too Ruby heavy to be a good source of information.
I'll probably give it another year or two to let things even out and then
throw it on, maybe with StackOverflow, which will hopefully undergo the same
process of broadening out from their initial community of .Net people.

~~~
danieldon

        It's still way too Ruby heavy to be a good source of information.
    

However, since Ruby projects are overwhelmingly (almost exclusively) hosted on
Github, excluding it suggests that Ruby is underrepresented.

~~~
davidw
Google code search looks at github too, actually.

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danieldon
Interesting. Python has a bigger drop in percentage, second only to VB.

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strebler
Just to note, article's main point (that C surpassed Java) also happened
previously in 2004-2005 as well, at least according to this Tiobe graph from
Wikipedia (cum grano salis):

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d3/Tiobe_index.pn...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d3/Tiobe_index.png)

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frou_dh
Go used more than ActionScript? What the?

~~~
jdminhbg
You can google for ActionScript without 'programming,' but not so for Go. I
think that explains its outlier status.

------
AdamN
I'm not totally surprised about Ruby becoming less important - more people are
moving to iPhone/iPad development and existing infrastructures (i.e. PHP) are
staying static.

~~~
danieldon
I didn't downvote you, but I'll point out that the actual percentage decline
for Ruby is very small (-0.35%), less than the declines of Python, Java, C++
and Javascript, and almost the same as PHP. The percentage rise of Objective-C
(2.15%) is far higher than what could have come from Ruby.

