TIOBE Programming Community Index for December 2010

The main page claims "the ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors" yet the definition page says that all they do is search for "$LANGUAGE programming" on a few sites and add up the hits. The sites are Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, Blogger, MSN, and Yahoo. None of these are particularly relevant to the industry and search results could be affected by a wide variety of factors. I don't see how any conclusive meaning can be derived from this methodology.

I find it strange, for example, that Scala is not in the top 50 and Clojure is not in the top 100, while languages I've never heard of make the top 20.

As someone who has done flash programming for the past 10 years I've never trusted this index. While I primarily work in objective-c these days, I can tell you from the size of the communities, to the amount of books that have been written, to the [very large number of jobs](http://jobsearch.monster.com/PowerSearch.aspx?q=flex&tm=...) in that field that this index just doesn't make sense to me.

Delphi is more popular than Javascript?

They count an all time low for Visual Basic at position 7, yet they have VisualBasic.NET at position 45, less popular than Logo, JavaFX and APL. When its not VB.NET at position 7, which Basic can they possibly mean? VBA? They can't possibly mean VB6, can they?

Yeah, these rankings are complete and utter bullshit.

I would say that Google searches for programming languages would be a little better as a benchmark. As it denotes the number of new users trying to learn a language (demand).

Google Trends for (some) functional languages: http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=31&q=erlang%2...

Just a shame that you can't add more than 5.

The TIOBE index is the homecoming queen at the school for the homely.

If you are going to date one of these girls, also check these out:

http://lang-index.sourceforge.net/

http://www.dataists.com/2010/12/ranking-the-popularity-of-pr...

For comparison, here are the tag trends on Stack Overflow: http://hewgill.com/~greg/stackoverflow/stack_overflow/tagtre...

I don't know if I agree with their methodology; YouTube, Blogger, and MSN are probably not the best source of information about the programing community.

More activity surrounding Python at the expense of PHP would be a good thing.