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The fact that there is no actual methodology published for how this index of popularity is actually generated makes me highly sceptical of the whole idea. All

The fact that there is no actual methodology published for how this index of popularity is actually generated makes me highly sceptical of the whole idea. All Tiobe (who make these ratings) say is: "Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings." What does this mean? What algorithm is used? If they expect these ratings to be taken seriously they should open source the methodology and data-sets and put their reasonings for why this data plus this algorithm gives a meaningful result.

pulse7 6y ago
Google doesn't reveal their search methodology and everybody is using it and taking it seriously...
- saberience 6y ago
  Google isn't saying their search means something is "better" or more popular though. If I search google for "restaurants near me" it shows me restaurants near my current location, or a link to Yelp etc which then relies on reviews by humans. If someone is telling me: "This index of 'top' programming languages is meaningful" I want to understand how said index is generated, because obviously there is a massive human element. You could make indexes like this which show Haskell is the top programming language if you used certain data points and similarly you could make Rust the top language if you used a different set of data points. It's totally open to authorial biases.
zserge 6y ago
They provide some additional information, but not the exact algorithm: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-definition/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-defi...
- jimbokun 6y ago
  The "Ratings" paragraph at the end seems detailed enough that you could reproduce their results for yourself?
abought 6y ago
How granular is this? Does that imply that a major news event (such as, say, a new language version) could drive perceived "popularity" simply by people reading/writing articles to evaluate it?
brzozowski 6y ago
> The fact that there is no actual methodology published for how this index of popularity is actually generated makes me highly sceptical of the whole idea. As soon as a metric becomes a target...
mumblemumble 6y ago
Basically, they count the number of hits returned by a search for "{language} programming" across a wide variety of search engines and websites, and rank the languages according to which one yields the most hits. It is an interesting metric, but I just can't bring myself to see it as the measure of popularity that it is presented as. The number of page hits for a language is a function of many things. Popularity is one. Others include age, complexity, and how confusing/difficult-to-learn the language or its libraries are. I'm guessing there's a marketability angle, too - for economic reasons, there may not be as many codepoints being poured onto languages whose users are less likely to purchase commercial tools or consulting services. I can think of no better illustration of this than the 5th, 6th and 7th places in this month's rankings. Does anyone really believe that JavaScript is only the 7th most popular programming language these days? Does anyone really believe that both C# and Visual Basic are more popular than JavaScript? If you take the TIOBE score as just a measure of popularity, it would seem to suggest that .NET developers are collectively over 3 times as numerous as JavaScript developers.
- gamblor956 6y ago
  C# and VB are very heavily used by businesses. Outside of the tech bubble it's believable that JavaScript isn't as popular.
  - mumblemumble 6y ago
    They are, but I don't know many C# and VB developers who aren't also using JavaScript. Just flogging your enterprise apps together in WinForms isn't so viable now that people want to be able to use MacBooks at work, too.
    - Weebs 6y ago
      We use JS but that code base is significantly smaller than our .NET base. I can only imagine there's a ton of massive ASP.NET MVC + a bit of jQuery internal apps still chugging along too
    - gamblor956 6y ago

pulse7 6y ago

Google doesn't reveal their search methodology and everybody is using it and taking it seriously...

saberience 6y ago
Google isn't saying their search means something is "better" or more popular though. If I search google for "restaurants near me" it shows me restaurants near my current location, or a link to Yelp etc which then relies on reviews by humans. If someone is telling me: "This index of 'top' programming languages is meaningful" I want to understand how said index is generated, because obviously there is a massive human element. You could make indexes like this which show Haskell is the top programming language if you used certain data points and similarly you could make Rust the top language if you used a different set of data points. It's totally open to authorial biases.

zserge 6y ago

They provide some additional information, but not the exact algorithm: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-definition/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-defi...

jimbokun 6y ago
The "Ratings" paragraph at the end seems detailed enough that you could reproduce their results for yourself?

abought 6y ago

How granular is this? Does that imply that a major news event (such as, say, a new language version) could drive perceived "popularity" simply by people reading/writing articles to evaluate it?

brzozowski 6y ago

> The fact that there is no actual methodology published for how this index of popularity is actually generated makes me highly sceptical of the whole idea. As soon as a metric becomes a target...

mumblemumble 6y ago

Basically, they count the number of hits returned by a search for "{language} programming" across a wide variety of search engines and websites, and rank the languages according to which one yields the most hits. It is an interesting metric, but I just can't bring myself to see it as the measure of popularity that it is presented as. The number of page hits for a language is a function of many things. Popularity is one. Others include age, complexity, and how confusing/difficult-to-learn the language or its libraries are. I'm guessing there's a marketability angle, too - for economic reasons, there may not be as many codepoints being poured onto languages whose users are less likely to purchase commercial tools or consulting services. I can think of no better illustration of this than the 5th, 6th and 7th places in this month's rankings. Does anyone really believe that JavaScript is only the 7th most popular programming language these days? Does anyone really believe that both C# and Visual Basic are more popular than JavaScript? If you take the TIOBE score as just a measure of popularity, it would seem to suggest that .NET developers are collectively over 3 times as numerous as JavaScript developers.

gamblor956 6y ago
C# and VB are very heavily used by businesses. Outside of the tech bubble it's believable that JavaScript isn't as popular.
- mumblemumble 6y ago
  They are, but I don't know many C# and VB developers who aren't also using JavaScript. Just flogging your enterprise apps together in WinForms isn't so viable now that people want to be able to use MacBooks at work, too.
  - Weebs 6y ago
    We use JS but that code base is significantly smaller than our .NET base. I can only imagine there's a ton of massive ASP.NET MVC + a bit of jQuery internal apps still chugging along too
  - gamblor956 6y ago