
TIOBE language popularity absurdity - fogus
http://accidentalidad.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/8/
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pragmatic
Anecdotal: There are several shops in town that use Progress 4GL. I used to
work at one of them. It is a definite niche language language, I had never
heard of it until I worked there.

However, if you are a customer of a (smaller) bank or credit union there's a
good chance that you are indirectly using this technology.

That said, I'm not sure what this rant is about? Is he mad that scala/groovy
are more niche?

You wouldn't find (any?) Progress 4GL on github because it's a commercial
language. You have to pay for it. But it generates millions of dollars of
sales and is in use in hundreds of companies (at some level).

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eliben
I find it really hard to understand why TIOBE keeps being brought up as an
authorative source when time and time again people demonstrate its inaccuracy.
Could it be just because there's no serious alternative?

Has anyone considered a more serious method of comparing programming language
popularity?

~~~
davidw
As the guy behind <http://langpop.com> I wonder too. I don't think my results
are perfect, but I think they're a bit better.

In any case though, no survey of this type is going to be entirely 'accurate'.
To be 'accurate', you'd have to follow around millions of programmers for a
few years and see what they're reading, writing and talking about, at home, at
work, and with friends. So I do the best with the data I can get.

Another thing to consider is what 'popular' means. You could consider both
'velocity' (current use) and 'acceleration' (increase in usage). Cobol for
instance, is widely used in some environments, but has no acceleration. Java
has a lot of the former, and still has quite a bit of use in new projects.
Something like Ruby is not widely deployed, but more popular for new web
projects.

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JoachimSchipper
TIOBE is not particularly accurate, but that doesn't mean that counting Github
projects is better.

~~~
davidw
Github is still hugely biased towards Ruby, which is one reason I still
haven't included it in <http://www.langpop.com>

~~~
dimmuborgir
How is it any different from Google Code (which you've included) which is
heavily biased towards C?

~~~
davidw
Google's Code search is heavily biased because there's a crapload of C code
out there, which makes sense, given that it's been around for nearly 40 years
and is used as the basis for... well, pretty much everything, including many
other programming languages.

Github's bias is based on the early adopter Ruby guys climbing on board
quickly.

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rmason
I've commented on here and other forums about the absurdity of Tiobe being
taken seriously. He changed the rules dropping one language nearly forty
places. I emailed him pointing out that following his new rules several other
languages would also drop. He replied to the effect it was his site and he
would do as he pleased.

Surely a site can be created that uses somewhat objective measures based on
jobs available, blog posts and tweet mentions etc to arrive at a more accurate
composite score.

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vorg
If a language in Tiobe drops from, say, 25 to 65 in a single month when the
number of search engines used increases to 7, then Tiobe's being gamed. You'd
think language implementers would have better things to do than create
webpages with circuits of links.

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derleth
How about this: Any language popularity index that doesn't include COBOL is a
joke.

This is an interesting requirement because COBOL is used everywhere the kinds
of people who make these indexes aren't looking. Finding ways to include it in
a reasonable fashion will likely uncover uses of other languages that really
are obscure, and _that_ would be interesting.

~~~
pragmatic
Exactly. There are COBOL jobs that go unfilled every year. The local college
started teaching it again (I think using COBOL.net of all things) because the
COBOL programmers are all retiring.

Seems to me TIOBE is a good tool to show your boss to convince him/her that
it's ok to use Ruby b/c it's gaining in popularity. (I wouldn't do that of
course, I would instead state that obviously Python is more popular and we
need to use that :-) )

