Tiobe ranks based on search results rather than visits, so languages can be ranked highly due to old computer generated docs that no one has ever read. Further

Tiobe ranks based on search results rather than visits, so languages can be ranked highly due to old computer generated docs that no one has ever read. Furthermore, tiobe only searches "x programming" which biases towards some languages and against others (Go and Julia come to mind as ones that are refereed to as Golang and Julialang frequently). Also, although the general results TIOBE gives look roughly accurate there are some entries that are wrong enough that you should question the validity of the ranking as a whole. For example, TIOBE ranks "Classic Visual Basic" as the 11th most popular language and claims that it has climbed 8 ranks in 2020. Given that the language hasn't been supported since 2008, and I have never heard of anyone using it for anything, that is rather surprising. Similarly, Tiobe appears to believe that Visual Basic is more popular than Javascipt which is frankly not credible (for refferrence, PYPL and IEEE place it at a much more believable 18th and 22nd).