Agreed, there are many, many publicly available methodologies to rate language popularity, none of which are great, but this one seems especially odd. It'd be

Agreed, there are many, many publicly available methodologies to rate language popularity, none of which are great, but this one seems especially odd. It'd be nice to see a time-lapse of the TIOBE index from 2009 to 2013: http://www.tiobe.com/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html http://www.tiobe.com/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html Or any of these dozen other measures (including mentions on delicious, or IRC): http://www.langpop.com/ http://www.langpop.com/ Or employer challenges posted on CodeEval: http://visual.ly/most-popular-programming-languages-2013 http://visual.ly/most-popular-programming-languages-2013 That said, the underlying thesis may be true that more projects today require more languages, hard to say.