Tiobe Index for January 2014 | Hacker News Reader

Tiobe Index for January 2014

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11 pointsadamnemecek14 comments

2 interesting things to me are how D is #18 and Go is #36. Given how many postings about Go you see on HN, you'd think it would be be the other way around.

Also I thought it was interesting about the rise of F#. That is a language that looks really cool, but it's tied to the whole Windows/.NET environment. Of course there is still mono. Has any had any experience with F# in mono, and know if it is as performant as the windows stack?

Didn't they admit that for every language, the "popularity" is simply the number of Google search results for "<language name> programming", and that, as a special case for Go, they changed it to "golang programming"?

A language could be at the top simply because it forces people to ask a lot of questions on StackOverflow.

I'd trust GitHub's language activity much more than something like Tiobe -- http://langpop.corger.nl/

These things all have biases though. Github is not going to show you much COBOL at all, and yet that language remains fairly popular in its own environment. The best thing is to include as many as possible and let people play with the weights.

I've done most of my development work in F# over the past few years. Most of that was on Windows, but I've done some cross-platform work using F# on Mono (on FreeBSD and Linux).

Overall, Mono isn't as fast as the .NET CLR on Windows, but it has improved greatly over the past few years (since Xamarin took over development from Novell and hired a team of full-time developers); in fact, a couple of months ago I saw a post here on HN about an HFT firm who'd built their trading stack on Mono.

As for F#, it's usually quite speedy, whether you run it on Windows or Mono (OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, etc.)

The absence of Clojure is what reminded me of the bubble I live in. Or should I say the Clojure Cave.

Clojure isn't absent on http://langpop.corger.nl/

When I search for "javascript programming" on Google I get 77M hits, but when I search for "transact-sql programming" I get 937k hits. Which seems real. The relative TIOBE rankings of the two languages does not.

EDIT: more searches:

    amazon:  javascript: 6010 hits, transact-sql: 1194 hits, t-sql: 2162 hits 
    youtube: javascript: 1.3M hits, transact-sql: 3970 hits, t-sql: 250k hits

I don't have any vested interest in it any more, having sold it on, but my own index was a lot better than TIOBE:

http://langpop.com/

I like langpop a lot, but is it showing C# correctly? On langpop, C# is shown as less popular than Ruby. Most of the other data sources that I have checked show Ruby as being only a fraction of the use of C#. C# is the dominant Microsoft language, and Microsoft still rules inside of large enterprises.

I do not work in large enterprises. In the universe that I inhabit, Ruby is popular and C# is unknown. I have always been curious that my own career seems so far out of step with what organizations like TIOBE show.

If it turns out that langpop is the most accurate of the data surveys out there, then it deserves credit for correctly showing the rise of Ruby.

Could be that C# is no longer working - it was always a bit fiddly because of how # gets treated by whatever search engine at a particular time. I haven't touched the code myself in years.

It's hard to believe that JavaScript and Transact-SQL have more or less the same popularity (1.569% against 1.559%). That's why I don't care about this index anymore.

there is a fascinating trend with shift away from "mainstream" (i.e. top of the list except for C) to functional (e.g. F#) and other languages with specialized paradigms (e.g. MATLAB, TSQL)

TIOBE is such a farce. Logo is ranked 21 in popularity this month.

C stands tall while the lesser languages devour each other.

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