A flaw that makes the Tiobe index easy to game is it uses the maximum results from querying several search engines to calculate the ranking, not the sum. That'

A flaw that makes the Tiobe index easy to game is it uses the maximum results from querying several search engines to calculate the ranking, not the sum. That's how in Oct 2013 Groovy rose to #18 in the index from outside the top 50 only 5 months earlier (May 2013). 3 months later (Jan 2014), Groovy had dropped back out of the top 50 (#32 in Nov, #46 in Dec). According to Tiobe's Janssen [1]: "It turned out that the data that is produced by one of the Chinese sites that we track is interpreted incorrectly by our algorithms. After we had fixed this bug, Groovy lost much of its ratings." Someone is also using a Chinese proxy to exploit Maven, boosting the apparent download figures for Groovy to target rankings like Redmonk [2]. Click on "country" and see where 85% of those downloads come from. [1] http://www.infoworld.com/t/application-development/c-pulls-away-java-among-top-programming-languages-230603 http://www.infoworld.com/t/application-development/c-pulls-a... [2] https://bintray.com/groovy/maven/groovy/view/statistics https://bintray.com/groovy/maven/groovy/view/statistics