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Comment by mrcharles | Hacker News Reader

Their methodology is suspect as hell:

"TIOBE Programming Community Index is an indicator of the programming language trends. It is updated monthly, this list is based on the number of experienced programmers,courses and third-party vendors on the Internet. It uses the well-known search engines (such as Google, MSN, Yahoo) as well as Wikipedia and YouTube to calculate the ranking."

Frankly that doesn't sound like a proper method to determine a ranking of anything, let alone programming languages.

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It is meant to be nothing but a trend indicator. Taken as such, and knowing that the methodology they use is flawed but mostly constant, then it actually works OK.

But a trend of what? I don't see how anyone can conclude "X is used more (for whatever 'more' means) than Y" simply because there are more documents on the web about X than Y.

From the TIOBE website: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

    The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

    The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system. The definition of the TIOBE index can be found here.

That last line points to the definition here: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/tpci_d...

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