5 ms·

Not perfect, but it feels significantly more realistic than the TIOBE index (http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index) or PYPL: https:/

Not perfect, but it feels significantly more realistic than the TIOBE index (http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index) or PYPL: https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html. The trouble is that I make this statement from a place of intuition, conscious of my own biases, so I could be wrong.

denfromufa 10y ago
TIOBE seems to be the most realistic with history tracing back to 1986. C/C++ coders have tons of code not on github and a lot of references like books, which are sometimes more useful than SO. Also the metrics, native language and area of application are very important.
- barking 10y ago
  Tiobe seem to alter their methodology fairly often which afaik also has the effect of altering historical rankings. In other words if you look at the TIOBE rankings on the wayback machine for a particular year in the past they can differ greatly from the rankings for that year given on the site today. For example, I think that VB was affected greatly by this
- jayvanguard 10y ago
  I find TIOBE to be so far from reality I question why it exists and anyone continues to pay any attention to it. It still ranks Delphi higher than Objective-C. Assembly language above Visual Basic. Dart above Scala, Erlang, Haskell, and Bash.
  - vorg 10y ago
    Tiobe's also cheated a lot by some language backers. Groovy jumped from 0.33% to 1.18% in a single month 6 months ago. See http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index?page=Groovy http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index?page=Groovy
zik 10y ago
It reflects the biases of github and stackoverflow which tend to reflect the interests of enthusiasts and web developers. I don't think it very accurately reflects what's used in real life, either for the innumerable hours of boring everyday programming work that people do or even what kind of code is being cranked out in the major open source projects - the ones that are actually used by other people. What it does provide is an interesting leading indicator: what's hot right now. Languages like clojure which get a lot of attention for a while but aren't used in a whole lot of real applications tend to peak and then drop relatively quickly.
- acangiano 10y ago
  You are spot on. The reason why this list resonated with me is that I am an "enthusiast and web developer". It's confirmation bias at play. As you said, this is still interesting, even if not accurate in absolute terms, as an indicator of what technologies are currently emerging among passionate developers.
- lazyjones 10y ago
  > It reflects the biases of github and stackoverflow which tend to reflect the interests of enthusiasts and web developers. That's a bit oversimplified IMO. SO doesn't reflect "interest in" as much as "having difficulties with". There must be "WAT"-type effects vs. simple, intuitive languages like Go factored in for it to provide useful information regarding popularity. It's a bit like counting hospitalized patients with sports injuries to rank sports activities by popularity. As for the relevance of github - people are always claiming their language detection is broken and I'd worry about the (intentionally?) skewing effects of moving the core language/library development to github.com like the Go project did.
  - mangodrunk 10y ago
    >SO doesn't reflect "interest in" as much as "having difficulties with". They are using it to have difficulties, so I think it is an interest in. Also, perhaps those that are beginners in things might have more questions, and show that also shows interest. This redmonk has some horrible graphs, and as you said, the method at which they categorize on github is flawed, let alone using stackoverflow or github as indicators being flawed.
jballanc 10y ago
TIOBE is much more about general computing/IT, evidenced by the relatively high ranking of things like COBOL and Transact-SQL. RedMonk, in contrast, seems more focused on pure programing (or, you might even say, the "hacker" community).
TwoBit 10y ago
I've been suspicious of Tiobe's ranking of C higher than C++ because I know hardly anybody using C any more. 90% or more of C/C++ programming I'm aware of is C++.
- kbart 10y ago
  Embedded and system level programming is still done almost universally in C and that's a huge segment. In reality I'd say C is even higher, because only a small part of code written in it ends up on GitHub, the rest is deep inside legacy systems.
- smcl 10y ago
  I was a bit confused too when I saw Swift ahead of Objective C
  - haimez 10y ago
    That one makes more sense to me. There's no legacy platform that only supports Objective-C and not swift, so virtually all the developers switched to the more pleasant to use language.
    - smcl 10y ago
      But there's almost a decade of existing Obj-C code (I'm guessing iOS apps comprise the bulk of objective C code). I would have thought porting that To Swift would be a Herculean effort - but I'm not using either language so maybe I'm not best placed to talk about this
- pjmlp 10y ago
  I guess you are not focusing on UNIX systems programming. Anything other than C and Assembly is sacrilege.
- dingo_bat 10y ago
  C rules the roost in embedded Linux devices. I suggested in my team that we move to C++ and was met with incredulous reactions. To be honest the only thing I seriously miss in C is std::vector.
myth_drannon 10y ago
I prefer StackOverflow careers as an indicator of language popularity in the industry. When you post a job you can only select 5 tech tags that accurately describe the position. I have been scraping SO for couple of months now. If you want to dig into the data, right now it's aggregated as json. https://github.com/aparij/soCareers-Data https://github.com/aparij/soCareers-Data

denfromufa 10y ago

TIOBE seems to be the most realistic with history tracing back to 1986. C/C++ coders have tons of code not on github and a lot of references like books, which are sometimes more useful than SO. Also the metrics, native language and area of application are very important.

barking 10y ago
Tiobe seem to alter their methodology fairly often which afaik also has the effect of altering historical rankings. In other words if you look at the TIOBE rankings on the wayback machine for a particular year in the past they can differ greatly from the rankings for that year given on the site today. For example, I think that VB was affected greatly by this
jayvanguard 10y ago
I find TIOBE to be so far from reality I question why it exists and anyone continues to pay any attention to it. It still ranks Delphi higher than Objective-C. Assembly language above Visual Basic. Dart above Scala, Erlang, Haskell, and Bash.
- vorg 10y ago
  Tiobe's also cheated a lot by some language backers. Groovy jumped from 0.33% to 1.18% in a single month 6 months ago. See http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index?page=Groovy http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index?page=Groovy

zik 10y ago

It reflects the biases of github and stackoverflow which tend to reflect the interests of enthusiasts and web developers. I don't think it very accurately reflects what's used in real life, either for the innumerable hours of boring everyday programming work that people do or even what kind of code is being cranked out in the major open source projects - the ones that are actually used by other people. What it does provide is an interesting leading indicator: what's hot right now. Languages like clojure which get a lot of attention for a while but aren't used in a whole lot of real applications tend to peak and then drop relatively quickly.

acangiano 10y ago
You are spot on. The reason why this list resonated with me is that I am an "enthusiast and web developer". It's confirmation bias at play. As you said, this is still interesting, even if not accurate in absolute terms, as an indicator of what technologies are currently emerging among passionate developers.
lazyjones 10y ago
> It reflects the biases of github and stackoverflow which tend to reflect the interests of enthusiasts and web developers. That's a bit oversimplified IMO. SO doesn't reflect "interest in" as much as "having difficulties with". There must be "WAT"-type effects vs. simple, intuitive languages like Go factored in for it to provide useful information regarding popularity. It's a bit like counting hospitalized patients with sports injuries to rank sports activities by popularity. As for the relevance of github - people are always claiming their language detection is broken and I'd worry about the (intentionally?) skewing effects of moving the core language/library development to github.com like the Go project did.
- mangodrunk 10y ago
  >SO doesn't reflect "interest in" as much as "having difficulties with". They are using it to have difficulties, so I think it is an interest in. Also, perhaps those that are beginners in things might have more questions, and show that also shows interest. This redmonk has some horrible graphs, and as you said, the method at which they categorize on github is flawed, let alone using stackoverflow or github as indicators being flawed.

jballanc 10y ago

TIOBE is much more about general computing/IT, evidenced by the relatively high ranking of things like COBOL and Transact-SQL. RedMonk, in contrast, seems more focused on pure programing (or, you might even say, the "hacker" community).

TwoBit 10y ago

I've been suspicious of Tiobe's ranking of C higher than C++ because I know hardly anybody using C any more. 90% or more of C/C++ programming I'm aware of is C++.

kbart 10y ago
Embedded and system level programming is still done almost universally in C and that's a huge segment. In reality I'd say C is even higher, because only a small part of code written in it ends up on GitHub, the rest is deep inside legacy systems.
smcl 10y ago
I was a bit confused too when I saw Swift ahead of Objective C
- haimez 10y ago
  That one makes more sense to me. There's no legacy platform that only supports Objective-C and not swift, so virtually all the developers switched to the more pleasant to use language.
  - smcl 10y ago
    But there's almost a decade of existing Obj-C code (I'm guessing iOS apps comprise the bulk of objective C code). I would have thought porting that To Swift would be a Herculean effort - but I'm not using either language so maybe I'm not best placed to talk about this
pjmlp 10y ago
I guess you are not focusing on UNIX systems programming. Anything other than C and Assembly is sacrilege.
dingo_bat 10y ago
C rules the roost in embedded Linux devices. I suggested in my team that we move to C++ and was met with incredulous reactions. To be honest the only thing I seriously miss in C is std::vector.

myth_drannon 10y ago

I prefer StackOverflow careers as an indicator of language popularity in the industry. When you post a job you can only select 5 tech tags that accurately describe the position. I have been scraping SO for couple of months now. If you want to dig into the data, right now it's aggregated as json. https://github.com/aparij/soCareers-Data https://github.com/aparij/soCareers-Data