To me this seems very tea-leaf-reading-ish. Specifically, some people tried to boil down the popularity of each programming language with a number (the tea lea

To me this seems very tea-leaf-reading-ish. Specifically, some people tried to boil down the popularity of each programming language with a number (the tea leaf). Then the OP simply looks at those numbers, points at some related events and say "Aha, that is how those numbers came to be!" (the reading). Neither the "leaves" nor the "reading" provide much value, IMO.