

TIOBE Index for April, 2014: F# Booming, Scala Busting, etc. - virtualwhys
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html?april-2014

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facorreia
I take a look at TIOBE from time to time, but I wonder how relevant it is. Is
JavaScript's popularity really about the same as Visual Basic.NET's? Is Python
more popular than JavaScript? Is PL/I more popular than Bash?

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virtualwhys
Good question re: TIOBE relevance.

I check it out more for language trends rather than fixed position; i.e. is
language X on an upward or downward trend.

Scala, for example, is my daily dev. so not thrilled to see it trending
downward o_O

Assumed Haskell would be trending upward along with F#

Food for thought regardless...

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frowaway001
TIOBE ranks seem to be kind of proportional to the activity of the language
creator's Twitter account.

Science ftw, I guess.

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virtualwhys
Not sure what's happening with Scala, it's been on a steady downward trend of
late (from 31 to 48).

F#'s meteoric rise, on the other hand, when will it plateau, top 10, top 5?

Haskell dropped out of the top 50 which was also a surprise.

Ruby seems to have stabilized, looks like it won't be evicted from the top 20
anytime soon.

Other than that the 4 Cs continue to dominate.

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gus_massa
After a few years of Physics laboratory. the lack of error intervals make me
cry :(.

I couldn’t find them. and I guess they are not available. So the only
possibility is to guesstimate. This can make a few of my friends that really
know statistics cry and never speak to me again. So don’t take my numbers too
seriously.

Fist we will assume that all the variation in the top 20 is due to noise, not
due to a tendency in the real data. This exaggerates the estimated noise. The
table of relative change = change / raiting is:

    
    
      Programming Language    Relative Change
      C                          -1.3%
      Java                       -1.9%
      PL/SQL                      9.0%
      Delphi/Object Pascal      -12.1%
      Ruby                      -13.2%
      JavaScript                 13.7%
      Lisp                      -13.8%
      Assembly                   16.4%
      Objective-C                25.5%
      C#                        -27.6%
      MATLAB                     31.6%
      (Visual) Basic            -36.6%
      Visual Basic .NET          37.2%
      Transact-SQL               38.5%
      D                          55.1%
      C++                       -58.3%
      F#                         85.9%
      PHP                       -95.6%
      Python                   -122.9%
      Perl                     -127.6%
    

(Ordered by absolute relative change.)

(Too many %. Example: Language: PL/SQL. Raiting: 0.782%. Change 0.07%.
Relative Change = Change / Raiting 9.0%)

There are 2 languages (Java and C) with a RC <2%, they are the bigger
languages, so this is possible not an artifact.

There is a group of 6 languages with 9%<RC<16%.

There is a group of 6 languages with 25%<RC<38%.

There are 6 languges with 50%<RC<130%

I think that we can optimistically estimate the error using the first group,
and approximate it as a 10% (but a 20% or a 30% is not out of discussion).

(Technical note: Some distributions are very “noisy”, if this were some
combination of Poisson distributions I’d expect a noise of 100%. But an easy
model for the Poisson distribution is that each developer choices each month a
language with a fixed probability, independently of the previous choice, this
assumes that developers have no memory. This is very different of the TIOBE
measurement, because they essentially measure the accumulated number of
webpages of each language, so this is very different from the no memory
model.)

\-----

Back to Scala: Did it drop from #31 to #48 in one month or it’s a multi month
“trend”?

This month, the ranking of ABAP (#31) is 0.367% and Scala (#48) is 0.0219. I
don’t have the Scala raiting of last month, so I’ll use 0.367%. The RC “is”
67%. It looks big for a month, but if the change was in a few months I’d think
it’s mostly noise.

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virtualwhys
Thanks for this.

Scala's drop has been over a 3 month period.

F#'s rise seems "real" given the consistently strong numbers of late.

