
Ask HN: Why are programming lang ranks on StackOverflow and Tiobe so divergent? - satishgupta
Most popular languages according to StackOverflow  2020 Survey: JavaScript, and C is way down below.<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;insights.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;survey&#x2F;2020#technology-programming-scripting-and-markup-languages-all-respondents<p>While in TIOBE index, which is based on search engine traffic, C just overtook Java. These two have been the top two languages since 2002.<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tiobe.com&#x2F;tiobe-index&#x2F;<p>How that can be explained?<p>Note that I am asking which language is better. I am trying to understand why these two are so different. Because how what programmers tell in a survey be so different from what they google?
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davidhbolton
Another excellent source is language subreddit subscriber numbers. Go to
[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/wiki/faq#wiki_what_lang...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/wiki/faq#wiki_what_language_reddits_are_there.3F)

Mind you the numbers for each language get out of date very quickly. Visit the
actual subreddit to see the true numbers.

As far as I'm concerned Tiobe is at odds with everybody else and should be
regarded as junk.

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rskar
TIOBE tracks the trends (or at least hopes to) of people looking to learn/re-
learn/familiarize/re-familiarize themselves about whatever programming
languages for whatever reasons. That's certainly the most one can really glean
by the stats on searches of +"<language> programming". People who are
"googling" so are not necessarily just starting out in the field, or learning
in school, or researching to decide what language to use in some greenfield
project. What's also likely is they are seeking employment someplace or
recently got work on somebody's (perhaps legacy) software; i.e. they're
searching for immediate professional interest.

StackOverflow attracts a population of programmers interested in regularly
helping out other fellow programmers navigate through whatever arcana of tools
and libraries and frameworks and languages etc. It will mostly be this set
that takes the survey. It also seems that it is the web/mobile technologists
that predominate, which is understandable considering how big a deal
web/mobile is. There seem to be so many new&shiny things in that web/mobile
sphere, year after year ("Web 2.0" is so early 2000's), and that's certain to
keep the arcana wheel going.

Fun factoid: Stack Overflow was founded by Microsoft alumnus Joel Spolsky and
developer/blogger Jeff Atwood. Spolsky, while Program Manager on the Excel
team, designed Excel Basic and drove Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications
strategy. Atwood says: "I was weaned as a software developer on ... Microsoft
BASIC in the 80's... I continued on the PC with Visual Basic 3.0 and Windows
3.1 in the early 90's... I am now quite comfortable in VB.NET or C#, despite
the evils of case sensitivity." ([https://blog.codinghorror.com/about-
me/](https://blog.codinghorror.com/about-me/)). Spolsky still seems proud of
Visual Basic: "I am always saying 'I could do that in a weekend in Visual
Basic' when developers tell me some feature is going to take a year."
([https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/04/06/the-stack-
overflow...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/04/06/the-stack-overflow-
age/)). Visual Basic has long been the "most dreaded" language on Stack
Overflow surveys, and in 2019 explicitly got dropped from that year's survey.
The very fact that VB.NET manages to be in the top 10 of TIOBE, and VB
clinging to the top 20 of TIOBE, has often been given as immediate evidence of
why TIOBE should not be taken seriously.

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matt_s
StackOverflow tends to attract new developers and newer language frameworks
simply because it is a Q&A site.

There are scores of developers out there that don't need beginner level help
with their language or use a proprietary language where the help they get is
via professional services training, courses, etc. Think whatever SAS or Oracle
ERP Apps use under the hood, as an example.

These surveys only purpose is marketing/research for the owner of the survey.

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pmontra
One is a survey in which people have to participate actively (so there is a
bias in favor of the languages with more vocal users) and the other one is a
sample of an indicator (of popularity? of complexity? other?)

I'm not surprised that they give different results. You can average the two
rankings and get something maybe closer to the real popularity.

You can also rank languages by number of repositories on github and get a
ranking with a different bias.

~~~
satishgupta
That is a good point.

I looked at GitHub:
[https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2020/2](https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2020/2)

And that matches with survey. How that can be reconciled? What are the biases
here?

~~~
pmontra
I might be wrong but there are only public repositories in that graph. Closed
source private projects are not there. The open source libraries they use do.

------
s1t5
The Tiobe ranking looks just plain wrong. It would be interesting to know how
exactly they're calculating and interpreting search engine traffic.

~~~
Someone
They don’t. They use search engines to do searches and count hits. See
[https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-
defi...](https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-definition/)

Their method means that, in general, their numbers will trail changes in
programming language popularity. For example, if everybody stopped using
JavaScript tomorrow, there still would be millions of hits on _+”JavaScript
programming”_ for years to come.

Also, their methodology overrates languages many people wrote about or those
that trigger more questions online. I would guess it underrates COBOL, for
example.

