Notable is the search-engine-optimized rise of Groovy from #82 to #17 in a mere 12 months. The subsequent TIOBE comment "Scala might gain a permanent top 20 pos

Notable is the search-engine-optimized rise of Groovy from #82 to #17 in a mere 12 months. The subsequent TIOBE comment "Scala might gain a permanent top 20 position soon" is probably a back-handed dig by TIOBE at the likely impermanence of Groovy's top 20 position. 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 Chinese sites that we track is interpreted incorrectly by our algorithms. After we fixed this bug, Groovy lost much of its ratings." But 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. It's a good bet that same feedback effect will be engineered before Groovy starts losing its new top 20 ranking, perhaps before next month. In fact, this sort of thing 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. In April 2011, however, 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 smoke-and-mirrors marketing intended to benefit a single stake-holder, probably the person who the groovy-lang.org DNS domain is the personal property of. [1] http://www.infoworld.com/t/application-development/c-pulls-away-java-among-top-programming-languages-230603 http://www.infoworld.com/t/application-development/c-pulls-a...