
2015's Most Popular Programming Language Was Good Old Java - aceperry
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/2015s-most-popular-programming-language-was-good-old-java
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nishs
Glad to see Groovy rising. Also, it won't be long long before golang breaks
into the top 20.

~~~
vorg
> Glad to see Groovy rising

If Groovy's rise was slow but steady, it would be good. But this latest rise
is more a case of extreme volatility for Groovy in the TIOBE rankings. It went
from #82 to #17 in a mere 12 months.

The last time Groovy made the top 20, it hit #18 in Oct 2013, but 3 months
later (Jan 2014), had dropped back out of the top 50 (#32 in Nov, #46 in Dec).
TIOBE said the following month "The data is produced by one of the sites that
we track is interpreted incorrectly by our algorithms. After we fixed this
bug, Groovy lost much of its ratings." [1] Just before that fix happened,
interviews with the current Apache spokesperson for Groovy (Guillaume Laforge)
promoting Groovy's top 20 position were published in 5 online rags
(www.infoworld.com, www.eweek.com, cacm.acm.org, jaxenter.com, and
glaforge.appspot.com), and all of them quickly appeared in Google's top 30
search results for "groovy programming" and remained there for 6 to 12 months
afterwards. I'm guessing the same feedback effect will be engineered again
before the end of this month, and Groovy will again start losing its new top
20 ranking.

This rapid rise then fall also happened with Groovy in December 2010. Groovy
began a sudden rise from outside the top 50 when Groovy tech lead Jochen
Theodorou "volunteered" his services to Tiobe in late 2010 to help them
improve their algorithms. Than in April 2011, Groovy fell from #25 to #65 on
Tiobe _in a single month_ after they increased the number of search engines
they monitor.

These fleeting peaks for Groovy in the TIOBE rankings (#25 in Apr 2011, #18 in
Oct 2013, #17 in Jan 2016) between its usual ranking of somewhere between #51
and #100 (e.g. #82 only 12 months ago) are a bad thing for Groovy because of
damage to its reputation as a solid language suitable for long-term IT
solutions. Such ranking volatility gives off the stench of search engine
optimization, a smoke-and-mirrors marketing tactic intended to benefit a
single stake-holder, probably the person who privately owns the groovy-
lang.org DNS domain.

[1] [http://www.infoworld.com/t/application-
development/c-pulls-a...](http://www.infoworld.com/t/application-
development/c-pulls-away-java-among-top-programming-languages-230603)

> it won't be long long before golang breaks into the top 20

Unlike Groovy, Golang's rise is slow but steady, with far more real users.
Just compare the activity on reddit.com/r/golang with that on
reddit.com/r/groovy and you'll see the stark difference.

