
The Rise And Fall of Languages in 2010 - fogus
http://www.drdobbs.com/tools/229100358;jsessionid=S2HMJB000P3PBQE1GHPSKHWATMY32JVN?actionType=twdl
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zeteo
"Over the years, the index has been both praised and vilified. The latter by
language adherents who are unhappy over the decline of their favorite idiom."

Really? That's the best defense that can be brought for the methodology - a
textbook ad hominem attack?

~~~
chromatic
Criticism merely reinforces the uncomfortable truths that the programming
elite have silenced for so long! Anyone who asks for reproducibility in
science is part of the conspiracy too!

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autarch
I thought TIOBE was vilified because it does a really bad job of measuring
what it claims to measure.

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postfuturist
This paints a very different picture: <https://github.com/languages>

edit: I realize this is measuring something different, but it suggests that
the reports of the decline of Ruby and JavaScript could be wrong.

~~~
CJefferson
There are two major problems with this:

Any project which has html documentation, which contains javascript, gets
counted as javascript.

git and github in particular seem very popular in some communities (ruby is a
good example) and less so in others (C++ comes to mind, as one I am familar
with).

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alxp
BitBucket seems to have a lot of Python projects hosted there which might take
a chunk out of Python's share on Github.

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gaiusparx
Alternative opinion: <http://langpop.com/>

~~~
russell
The langpop link is interesting because it does an analysis by source. If you
are familiar with Craigslist, you can see some of the problems with the
methodologies. The SF Bay Area is heavily into web development, so PHP is no
surprise. But C and C++ are second and third and essentiallt tied. That much C
development going on? Not really. The majority of listing have C\C++ some
where in the acronym stew, just to indicate that they want real programmers.
So what were companies hiring a year ago, when last I looked? PHP, Java, C#,
Ruby, and C++. All the rest was HR noise. But it's more interesting than
nothing.

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jacquesm
Allright, who has been playing with the random number generator?

One thing you'll have to do before looking at the data presented here (if you
want to give it a second look) is to take into account that there is a lot
more to programming than just web programming.

But even with that in mind I have a hard time seeing Assembly on the rise and
JavaScript dropping and named in one breath with delphi.

And I'm not a fan of any of those (ok, maybe assembly), so that can't be it.

If you want to skip the article to go right to the data it's here:

[http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....](http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html)

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rbanffy
Ada, RPG on OS/400 and Transact SQL? Really?

Anyone risks a hypothesis on why this happened in 2010?

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protomyth
Lot defense work, people not replacing OS/400 machines and still needing new
features, and MS sold a lot of databases this year[1].

[1] If you go through your corporate approval process to replace mysql because
your mad at Oracle, don't be surprised if SQL Server walks in the door.

~~~
rbanffy
Why would I want to replace MySQL. It's GPL. Larry may scream all he wants and
business will continue as usual. The worst that can happen is to use a forked
version.

Drizzle is very interesting, BTW.

~~~
protomyth
Welcome to the wonderful world of corporate America, a good Microsoft
salesman, and listening to the tech press. :)

~~~
rbanffy
It never ceases to amaze me how resilient corporations are, given so many
decisions are delegated to the people least qualified to make them.

The only reason I read mainstream tech publications is to know which silly
ideas I will have to demolish in the near future because some clueless PHB
decided it would be the next great thing.

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hristov
Yes and if you believe their data, Pascal and ADA are also on the ascendancy.

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chipsy
I can see some rationales for both modern Pascal dialects and Ada as
application languages. Foot-shooting is less readily achieved than in C or
C++, and the compilers and libraries are mature, so you can do some pretty
heavy lifting. As well, Oracle is scaring people away from the JVM, so where
the answer for a lot of apps used to be "Java, period," now we're probably
seeing more investigation of alternatives.

~~~
mahmud
I can't imagine anyone being chased away from Java by Oracle's IP claims would
run to Java. They are such different languages, so much so that this assertion
is as audacious as claiming people who recently quit smoking are becoming
addicted to cabbage and other leafy vegetables.

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steveklabnik
Ugh, Tiobe. I wish we could come up with a better measure for this. I don't
really feel that Tiobe's index is worth anything at all.

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marcusbooster
JavaScript with a double-arrow drop in 2010?

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rbanffy
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiobe_index>

"Tiobe programming community index is an ordered list of programming
languages, sorted by the frequency of web search using the name of the
language as the keyword"

Maybe people are searching more for specific frameworks and libraries instead
of the language. I work mostly in Python and it's been a long time since I
last googled for "python". These days I google for "django" or "appengine".

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rwmj
Because obviously the most popular languages must be the best ones.

~~~
chromatic
... and obviously it's trivial to filter out false cognates when analyzing
search term volume.

... and obviously it's statistically meaningful to compare year over year
trends without accounting for changes in global search volume.

... and obviously you can trust an index even if it doesn't know the
difference between a web browser and a language implementation.

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jawee
I fear that attempting to name the "best" languages is just as fruitless as
trying to name to the most "popular" languages.

