Javascript in 2019 only has 0.5% more market share than in 2004?
2019 has basically every new UI (and many rewrites of old ones) being built in Javascript, 2004 it was being used for the occasional drop down menu.
(Even if you include Typescript, the only compile-to-JS language in the top 50, it still only gets to 2.7% today compared to 2% in 2004).
See also C unassailably at number 2. I think we can all agree that in 2019, there is more active development in Javascript, than C - Likely it's benefiting from their methodology giving it credit for C++ and C#, so at least we can theorise about that one, but I really have no idea for Javascript.
Part of the problem is that their methodology is based heavily on performing web searches for the phrase "$LANGUAGE programming".
Lots of developers use Javascript in the course of their work. Few of them will refer to their work as "Javascript programming" -- they will typically use either a broader term, like "web development", or a more specific one, like "React development". Neither of these would influence TIOBE's rankings.
If I want to find the MDN page for destructuring assignment in JavaScript I know I don’t need to add JavaScript or MDN, I can just search for “Array Destructuring”, and the top half dozen results are all JavaScript.
And if I want to search for say which of call/apply takes an array, or even confirm what version of php a new flag is introduced, I’m not searching for “$language programming $feature”.
I’m using DDG bangs to reduce the noise from the start and take me straight to a site specific result : `!mdn function apply` or eg `!php preg_split`.
> 2019 has basically every new UI (and many rewrites of old ones) being built in Javascript
yeah... no
> See also C unassailably at number 2. I think we can all agree that in 2019, there is more active development in Javascript, than C
bubbles, bubbles, bubbles. the immense majority of large companies I see start new GUI projects in Java, C#, C++, ... daily. Count the hundred of thousands of programmers working for gigacompanies like Samsung (with more than 40k devs), ATOS (122K employees, mostly devs), CapGemini (211k employees, mostly devs), etc... they are far from all doing JS.
I've noticed this issue a lot more recently. Developers who live in a language / platform bubble that assume that the large majority of paid developers are using whatever trendy language and less than 24 month old framework they're on etc.
Listen kids. A colossal amount of the software engineering that takes place on this earth is paid development for closed source apps and services. It's not on GitHub. It's not written in JavaScript. It's not done on Node.js. A great deal of it doesn't happen in California. And it dwarfs the amount of software on GitHub or GitLab.
It happens in Java and C++ and C# and Visual Basic and other not-sexy languages and involves writing crappy enterprise interfaces and tons of backend code.
The great thing about TIOBE is its a good indicator of what jobs are being hired for. That's why it doesn't match whatever trendy expectations most people expect to see in a languages ranking. That's why Visual Basic is always ranked so highly. Because the actual world of paid software engineering and your mental view of that world are wildly different.
Personally I think TIOBE is very valuable for what it's for. I tell young developers to use its top 10 list as a guide for where to invest your time IF you're taking a "safe" approach to career skills and employability. If you use one of the other guides for that, you may decide that learning new and exciting languages might be optimal for employment. Generally speaking that's not the case.
If one wants filter bubble expectations met, I recommend sticking to language rankings that are solely based on GitHub and other publicly available source code.
The Tiobe index is based entirely on search engine result counts. Those numbers aren't even particularly meaningful as a count of web pages; treating them as an authoritative source of programming language popularity, as TIOBE does, is ridiculous.
There are a couple of really strange comparisons you can spot in the results. For example, Scratch -- a visual programming language made for children which is only usable on its own web site -- is ranked higher than TypeScript, Lua, Scala, Kotlin, or Rust. Similarly, D -- a proposed replacement for C++ which has never found any real traction -- is ranked even higher.
Not to defend the TIOBE index (claims to be a measure of popularity of programming languages) but if you go by the dictionary definition of popularity ("the state of being liked, enjoyed, accepted, or done by a large number of people") I don't doubt that Scratch is more popular than Lua, Scala, Kotlin or Rust. If I think about my friends and acquaintances, most of them certainly have never heard of any of those languages, but I'm sure almost all of their kids were exposed to Scratch at some point.
Or look at how the "rating" for C dipped precipitiously, then climbed back up, between 2016 and 2018. There wasn't a sudden shift in the popularity of the language over those two years -- that's the source data being unreliable.
This is the impression I get as well. VB.NET > JavaScript?
Here's what they say about their methodology:
> The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. It is important to note that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.
And some of that "methodology" is seriously suspect.
> Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings.
Bing and Yahoo! are both front ends to the same search engine. Wikipedia, Amazon, and YouTube aren't general-purpose search engines at all, and it's unclear how accurate the results of a Baidu search would be for English-language search terms like "Javascript programming".
It's the Dow Jones Index of indicators. Totally pointless.
The best measure of a language's popularity needs to take job vacancies and github metrics as their most meaningful measures. Stackoverflow posts and google searches will help too but contain a lot of natural bias.
Agreed, but having said that there are a lot of people developing for iOS who never made the switch due to past language instability and continued poor quality tooling.
Outside of iOS I don’t think it’s made a dent and I would be surprised if things like Swift for Tensorflow make a difference there (if only because the number of ML devs is very small and the appeal of Swift for ML is also pretty small).
