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Python leads Tiobe Index for first time in 20 years
- phaedryx 5y agoRemember folks, the Tiobe Index is a ranking of how many web searches are being done for a language. The farther you get from that metric the more you are speculating.
- truly 5y agoI find that it is a good proxy for how much each language is being used.
- cjaybo 5y agoHow do you find that?
- truly 5y agoIt seems clear that the more a language is used, the more a programmer will makes searches. Not a linear relation, but it is common sense.
- phaedryx 5y agoIt seems clear that the worse the documentation for a language is, the more a programmer will make searches. Not a linear relation, but it is common sense. It seems clear that the harder a language is to understand, the more a programmer will make searches. Not a linear relation, but it is common sense. It seems clear that [reason somebody would do a search] ...
- ljoshua 5y agoYou may want to also consider other data points like the annual Stack Overflow Developer Survey [0]. Again, it's not necessarily the perfect stat reflecting actual real-world language use (since it's really more about languages used by visitors to SO), but I'd say it's a pretty decent proxy. [0]: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#technology https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#technology
- jstx1 5y agoAre we going to pretend that there are really more searches for C and Visual Basic than for Javascript? I don’t know what they’re measuring exactly and how but on the surface it doesn’t pass the smell test. edit: Here's the actual method - https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-definition/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-defi.... It doesn't count searches.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> Are we going to pretend that there are really more searches for C and Visual Basic than for Javascript? Probably. A lot of things I would add the language name to while searching for another language I qiickly learned tagging MDN on instead gets the best JS info, and once on MDN, navigating between topics rather than doing a new search for a related topic os much more common than the haphazard set of resources that you end up with for many languages. Of course, that's a minor reason among the vast number of reasons why number of web searches explicitly targeting the language is a horrible measure of language popularity or impact.
- jstx1 5y agoThey don't even count searches (i.e. traffic), they count hits from searches in a number of popular engines - https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-definition/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-defi... > The ratings are calculated by counting hits of the most popular search engines. The search query that is used is +"<language> programming". The number of hits determines the ratings of a language.
- lr1970 5y agoWhatever they do TIOBE Index methodology is flawed. MATLAB at #13 ahead of Ruby #16 and Swift #17 makes no sense. MATLAB is a niche language popular mostly among Electrical and Mechanical Engineers while Ruby and Swift are general purpose and have much larger user and project base.
- lvass 5y agoTiobe is great. Whenever I see someone taking those rankings at face value, I get wary of their ability or general motivation to check their sources.
- ZuLuuuuuu 5y agoIsn't it how many results there are for searching "LANGUAGE_NAME programming"? Not how many people searched for it. Or maybe I am mixing it up...
- omoikane 5y agoIt actually counts number of search results. I think the intent was to use number of web pages as a proxy to measure popularity of languages, but since large chunks of the web are behind walled gardens (e.g. social networks that are invisible to bots), this metric might not be as relevant as it used to be.
- CodeGlitch 5y agoThere is also: https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html Which ranks languages based on number of tutorials searched for (via Google trends). It also has python at number 1. I lucked out and learnt python 10 years ago so feel "ahead of the game". It's a language that feels so malleable... Thre only negative is that type annotations aren't part of the core language. You have to run a separate tool (mypy) to check your types. Feels like it should be a flag on CPython or something.
- GrumpyYoungMan 5y agoI'm more inclined to believe Collabedit's stats as a measure of language use in indsutry since it's commonly used for online interviews. http://collabedit.com/programming-language-stats http://collabedit.com/programming-language-stats
- truly 5y agoThis is nice, but not really much of a surprise. With tons of ready-to-use libraries for string processing, machine learning, images, graphics, game development, web, etc., there is not much to dislike about it. It is my goto language for quick scripts -- works flawlessly on Windows/Linux/Mac. The only downside is efficiency and being one-threaded, but if you are gluing together library calls, which you are most of the time, then it is good enough.
- r-zip 5y agoI disagree. Python's popularity is actually kind of tragic. The package ecosystem leads many to choose Python, which has both maintenance and performance scalability issues (not to mention the sorry state of packaging, distribution, and parallelism). So it causes plenty of headaches, despite its friendly syntax. In those senses, choosing Python is like a trap.
- silicon2401 5y agoI've always wished that Ruby had the place of Python. For all the love that Python syntax gets, Ruby syntax and the gem system are an absolute joy to work with.
- singularity2001 5y agopython is built on solid fundamentals, ruby less so. I used to love ruby, but their inner workings seem more ad hoc if you look under the hood (AST and broken operator logic)
- zerocrates 5y agoHuh, I've always found dealing with gems/bundler to be a pain point. I'm sure to some degree it's just that nobody likes whichever package system is the "one more" in their workflow.
- lvass 5y agoI absolutely agree, but this sort of tragedy is a bit unavoidable. What language would you choose to have that ecosystem instead? The next thing right now is probably JS which is even worse. Every language has plenty of issues. Python's worst IMO is how C extensions and other stuff are tied to an interpreter definitely unsuited for it's popularity. Parallelism shouldn't really creep in considering how most code is written. The only language I can think of being better is Lisp if somehow the lisp curse wasn't a thing.
- TekMol 5y agoPython has one giant plus over pretty much every other popular language: The syntax I was reluctant to to meaningful whitespace for a long time. But after doing some projects in Python I have to admit the code looks so much better than C style languages with all the {, } and ;s And it has one giant plus over PHP: The module system PHP went down the wrong road (of insanity) by deciding that the way to avoid naming conflicts is to use longer classnames. Because that is what namespaces in PHP are. Comfort tools to make your class names longer. There is still one giant benefit of PHP over Python: Performance Currently, PHP is about 6x faster than Python. Let's hope that the Python devs will focus on performance so we get the best of all worlds at one point!
- Bostonian 5y agoYou can avoid curly braces and semicolons and also not have indentation determine the control flow. Julia, Fortran, Visual Basic, and other languages do this.
- TekMol 5y agoNone of these 3 is in the top 10. Personally, I would only consider languages very close in popularity to the leading one when deciding on the language for a new project.
- Bostonian 5y agoVisual Basic and Classic Visual Basic are in spots 6 and 11. I am not against Python's use of indentation, but I don't think it's better than having keywords such as endif or next terminate blocks.
- TekMol 5y agoWow, you are right. Still, I don't think I would choose Visual Basic to build the next big thing though :)
- Zababa 5y ago
- RantyDave 5y agoAssembly ahead of Ruby? That doesn't seem right.
- jstx1 5y agoAnd VB is ahead of Javascript. Tiobe is useless as a measurement of anything.
- jimbokun 5y agoHow do you know? Maybe there's an endless army of programmers supporting ancient one off VB programs written for various odd tasks across many organizations.
- adgjlsfhk1 5y agoTiobe's methodology sucks and their results are equally bad.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- zh3 5y agoNot quite endless, but plenty of programmers out there grinding it out in 'unfashionable' languages.
- fquark 5y agoSo Javascript, SQL and PHP hover around at 2.5%. This index does not seem to be very meaningful. More akin to "confirmed by Netcraft" (a Slashdottism).
- sireat 5y agoTurns out being No. 2 language for all domains leads to being No. 1 What is fascinating that Classic Visual Basic jumped from 19 to 11. TIOBE is like that I've been teaching Python for the last few years and there has been a marked increase in using Python to "Automate the boring stuff". Adult students come to tell me that Pascal or C++ taught in school was just not something they could use practically, however Python is very practical across many disciplines. Of course if we could solve the deployment issue on a fresh computer...
- kamaal 5y agoPython feature and library bloat is at late 1990s and early 2000s levels Perl these days. This has made Python very accessible and useful to Perl refugees. This explains the pervasive use of Python to "Automate the boring stuff".
- agumonkey 5y agoeven if tiobe is not solid, I sense a bit cover effect for python
- Barrin92 5y agoone can argue about how much of an exact science Tiobe or other indices are but Python definitely is everywhere and has continued to grow in a lot of domains. And I think deservedly so because to me it is by far the most pleasant and versatile general purpose language around. People have their legitimate gripes about performance but a language that is used for everything from scripting to gigantic industy scale applications (largest I'm aware of is a ~30 million LOC codebase at JPMorgan) has done some things right.
- BuckRogers 5y ago30MKLOC in Python? Largest I've seen is 500K and that was one overcooked codebase. So problematic. They were looking at a Java rewrite. I'd love to read a lengthy insider exposé on that JPM codebase.
- eesmith 5y agoI was curious about the LOC sizes of some well-known packages: % cd Python-3.9.1 % wc -l `find . -name '*.py'` | tail -1 843196 total % cd ~/clones/numpy % wc -l `find . -name '*.py'` | tail -1 256900 total % cd ~/clones/scipy % wc -l `find . -name '*.py'` | tail -1 397250 total % cd ~/clones/django % wc -l `find . -name '*.py'` | tail -1 383167 total That's not quite 2MLOC.
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- hungryforcodes 5y agoWell it's basically Visual Basic for adacemics and it excels at that. Aside from it's obvious problem: Python is a very practical, though almost generic language, with a rich collection of useful libraries -- so why not?
- slightwinder 5y agoIt's also the better shellscript for administrators. And user-friendly, like basic. It excels on many fronts. The surprise is more that it took so long to reach that point, considering how old and widely used it is.
- jeremyjh 5y agoThere is no large tech company heavily promoting it.
- hungryforcodes 5y agoThat's a great point! It was invented somewhere in the late 90s, no? So maybe it was a confluence of alot of things that broke it out finally.
- BeetleB 5y ago1990.
- hungryforcodes 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Mikeb85 5y agoThe index reads more like a list of 'Programming languages that university students search for on Google'. VB in the top 10? Matlab, R and Fortran so high? Kotlin and Dart in the 30's? And JS not top 3?