

C programming language back at number one position - yu
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1600105/mind-language

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minus1
An explanation of the strange dip in Java popularity in 2004:

Q: What happened to Java in April 2004? Did you change your methodology?

A: No, we did not change our methodology at that time. Google changed its
methodology. They performed a general sweep action to get rid of all kinds of
web sites that had been pushed up. As a consequence, there was a huge drop for
languages such as Java and C++. In order to minimize such fluctuations in the
future, we added two more search engines (MSN and Yahoo) a few months after
this incident.

[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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_delirium
Given the huge margins of error in their methodology, the differences seem too
small to justify a headline like that. They aggregated all sorts of noisy data
sources (one even being the number of hits for a web search!), and found that
C has pulled ahead of Java by... 0.007%. Whatever MOE you want to put on their
figures, I'd be willing to be it should be more than 0.007%... probably >1%.

