
Java drops to #2 in TIOBE index - vijaydev
http://www.theserverside.com/discussions/thread.tss?thread_id=59932
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davidw
My numbers are better than theirs: <http://langpop.com> \- I use multiple
sources. While I stand by my results, I think that they are, by their very
nature, not all that precise, so making a big deal out of a blip like this is
great for publicity, but probably not very meaningful.

~~~
Vitaly
not sure if freshmeat and google code are the all that 'authorative' about the
opensource projects using languages. for one most Ruby projects are hosted on
github.

~~~
davidw
I'm more interested in releases than 'hosted projects', as many of the latter
are unfinished. Which is why I've always used Freshmeat rather than
Sourceforge.

I agree that it's probably a bit long in the tooth, and I'd be happy to add
something newer, as long as it's not too terribly biased. Which, however, I
think github (and StackOverflow) continue to be: the former in favor of Ruby,
the latter in favor of various Microsoft things.

~~~
Vitaly
well, the best thing might be to just combine all the project listings you can
pull from all the sites together. for what it worth you can try to only pull
recent projects, or projects passing some minimal threshold of 'usage' like
download count on sf or watch/fork count on github. but w/o counting the
github you are _severely_ undercounting ruby projects. the ones on google code
and freshmeat are a statistical aberration to the real count :) ruby people
just don't care enough about freashmeat to use it much. all that matters is
really just on the github. 'releases' announced on blogs/mailing lists and by
releasing new version of a 'gem'. no need to duplicate it on some horrible
'releases' site still stuck in the 90-s :). rubygems package manager does a
great job of informing people of new versions.

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devinj
_Is it cause for concern, or just a statistically insignificant blip?_

It seems obvious to me that it is neither. Even among java programmers, a
miniscule fall that brought it a tiny bit below another language that isn't
generally used for the same things as Java is totally unimportant. Not to
mention other JVM languages are climbing up the rankings. And it's not very
sound as a basis for what languages are important.

And it's _definitely_ not a blip. Java's been going down for years in the
TIOBE rankings.

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tomh-
Seriously? Go outranks action script? This list is flawed.

~~~
grayrest
I'm suspicious of their sources when Delphi outranks Javascript as well...

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johnohara
The claim is that Java is losing ground to other languages that use the JVM
yet very few in the top-50 rely on the JVM. JavaFX is cited but it's only
"approaching" the top-20.

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rbanffy
I am only surprised it's second to C.

~~~
gphil
If you look at the list, Objective-C has also jumped up 31 spots since last
April. I'm wondering if a shift toward development for mobile devices (iPhone
and otherwise) has caused C to leapfrog Java.

~~~
rbanffy
> iPhone and otherwise

Objective-C is not particularly useful for any other mobile platform that's
not Apple's

~~~
JoelMcCracken
"otherwise" as ipad, ipod touch...

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api
I get the feeling that C and C++ are undergoing a mini-renaissance right now.
This is a good thing.

The high level language / low-level language thing is one of the "cycles of
reincarnation" in software.

I do sometimes wonder... if we spent our time cleaning up the C/C++ ecosystem
instead of recoding everything in the newest language of the month, would we
get further with that?

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ableal
I noticed the delta from #1 to #2 is 0.007%, i.e. in the 4th significant digit
if you round.

(I suppose that if a C programmer had the flu for a couple of weeks, it would
be a tie ...)

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fleitz
It's the new COBOL!

It doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, I think one of the
worst reasons to use a particular language is because of it's popularity. Java
did a lot of great things but I think its time has passed.

The codebase that is out there makes it difficult to make any significant
changes to the language. (eg. generics)

It's lagging because its popularity makes any revolutionary changes
impractical to enterprise customers (eg. Oracle). I actually think that Oracle
may piss the community off enough that the open source forks of java start
making improvements to the language. (eg. MySQL)

New language features are being added to JVM based languages such as scala and
clojure instead. This allows new ideas (i realize these are old ideas from a
LISP perspective) to florish and reuse the extensive codebase.

