61–68 of 68 posts
There is no reason to believe, and no facts are given to support the notion, that there is ANY correlation between popularity of a programming language and the number of web documents related to that language.
TIOBE just leaves it to us to draw that conclusion ourselves, and then we commence arguing over it.
Please, please, stop with this TIOBE nonsense. This index is a joke - can't someone with a burning desire for a weekend project create an open-sourced index website and engage with other hackers to incrementally improve it?
Why is the question of "What programming language is most popular" one that needs an answer?
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It would strongly violate my expectations for Scala to be more popular than LabVIEW (which is NOT just "the Lego Mindstorms language") or Visual FoxPro. The "community" they're measuring is not the HN community, which is not even close to a representative sample of engineers worldwide.
> It would strongly violate my expectations for Scala to be > more popular than LabVIEW (which is NOT just "the Lego > Mindstorms language") I'm not talking about LabView; it's literally the Lego Mindstorms language [1] that outranks Erlang, MATLAB, ActionScript, Scheme, Groovy, R, Scala, and so Forth. LabView appears in the "Can't compare that meaningfully" category. So consider your expectations violated. > The "co…
The treemap is especially interesting. The square size shows market size, while the background color shows percentage change from previous year. E.g. both Scala and Clojure have green "increasing share" squares, while nearby Groovy and Labview have smaller, red "decreasing share" squares.
Because people need to pay OReilly for the book, it's much more difficult to cheat than Tiobe, which only takes some "Project Manager" to spend half their day creating websites, generating cycles of links, producing online verbiage, submitting pages to search engines, blah blah blah
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 pr…
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.
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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.
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.
Excuse my apparent ignorance, but people are still programming in C? Why? On which fields? Is there something C can do better than Java or C#?
Off the top of my head, big important projects written in C, which are still actively developed: * Linux * GNU * Apache * Ruby * Python * nginx * mysql * posgresql * Redis * VMWare * OpenSSL * Almost everything "embedded" Because C allows extreme control and performance. Anecdotally, a lot of people write in higher level languages, then rewrite critical bits in C for that speed boost. In many cases they just start at…
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>So a better metric would be to aggregate the projects from > all popular project hosting services and count them, with > some kind of weight attached. Great idea. Do you think you might run with this idea? I like it as a corrective to TIOBE. On another topic: I know that TIOBE sometimes lumps several related languages together. Does anyone know if they are doing that with "Lisp"? What does "Lisp" measure? Common Lis…
Someone can and has run with it: http://langpop.com "Unfortunately", that someone now has a house, two kids, and more work than he can handle, and is thus looking to exit the fun and flame filled world of language popularity. Based on Instagram's valuation, I guess I'd settle for a million for it;-)
Can you email me at lawrence @ krubner . com? I'd like to know how much you want to sell langpop for.
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Off the top of my head, big important projects written in C, which are still actively developed: * Linux * GNU * Apache * Ruby * Python * nginx * mysql * posgresql * Redis * VMWare * OpenSSL * Almost everything "embedded" Because C allows extreme control and performance. Anecdotally, a lot of people write in higher level languages, then rewrite critical bits in C for that speed boost. In many cases they just start at…
I'm aware of almost all of that, but my point wasn't about things already written in C, I'm talking about why keep writing in C. Extreme control and performance are unique traits of C? Being a relic of the past, it lacks greats thing modern languages take for default (like, I don't now, memory management, for example). That's where my point was heading. Can't new languages in the multicore age address this issue in a…
Think about what a gc pause would do to an OS - it could kill performance for every single process on the system, cause issues with input buffers overflowing, and other related issues. A microsecond here and there in call latency may not matter most of the time, but in thousands of syscalls or in low level network processing have large cumulative effects.
Don't get me wrong, I love my high level languages and modern GC runtimes, but there are days and places when microseconds and bytes still matter, and for those, I still grab C. Just like the nailgun hasn't fully replaced the hammer, or the vacuum hasn't fully replaced the broom, there is a good reason C still exists and finds acceptance.
Maybe Go or Rust will start to creep even more into the C space than JVM etc already have, but I really don't see it fully going away, it is just too useful and a well understood proper tool for some jobs.