Hacker News Reader

TIOBE seems to be the most realistic with history tracing back to 1986. C/C++ coders have tons of code not on github and a lot of references like books, which are sometimes more useful than SO. Also the metrics, native language and area of application are very important.

View on HN

Tiobe seem to alter their methodology fairly often which afaik also has the effect of altering historical rankings. In other words if you look at the TIOBE rankings on the wayback machine for a particular year in the past they can differ greatly from the rankings for that year given on the site today. For example, I think that VB was affected greatly by this

I find TIOBE to be so far from reality I question why it exists and anyone continues to pay any attention to it. It still ranks Delphi higher than Objective-C. Assembly language above Visual Basic. Dart above Scala, Erlang, Haskell, and Bash.

Tiobe's also cheated a lot by some language backers. Groovy jumped from 0.33% to 1.18% in a single month 6 months ago. See http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index?page=Groovy

Reply on news.ycombinator.com