Remember folks, the Tiobe Index is a ranking of how many web searches are being done for a language. The farther you get from that metric the more you are speculating.
Which ranks languages based on number of tutorials searched for (via Google trends). It also has python at number 1.
I lucked out and learnt python 10 years ago so feel "ahead of the game". It's a language that feels so malleable...
Thre only negative is that type annotations aren't part of the core language. You have to run a separate tool (mypy) to check your types. Feels like it should be a flag on CPython or something.
> Are we going to pretend that there are really more searches for C and Visual Basic than for Javascript?
Probably. A lot of things I would add the language name to while searching for another language I qiickly learned tagging MDN on instead gets the best JS info, and once on MDN, navigating between topics rather than doing a new search for a related topic os much more common than the haphazard set of resources that you end up with for many languages.
Of course, that's a minor reason among the vast number of reasons why number of web searches explicitly targeting the language is a horrible measure of language popularity or impact.
> The ratings are calculated by counting hits of the most popular search engines. The search query that is used is +"<language> programming". The number of hits determines the ratings of a language.
Whatever they do TIOBE Index methodology is flawed. MATLAB at #13 ahead of Ruby #16 and Swift #17 makes no sense. MATLAB is a niche language popular mostly among Electrical and Mechanical Engineers while Ruby and Swift are general purpose and have much larger user and project base.
It actually counts number of search results. I think the intent was to use number of web pages as a proxy to measure popularity of languages, but since large chunks of the web are behind walled gardens (e.g. social networks that are invisible to bots), this metric might not be as relevant as it used to be.
You may want to also consider other data points like the annual Stack Overflow Developer Survey [0]. Again, it's not necessarily the perfect stat reflecting actual real-world language use (since it's really more about languages used by visitors to SO), but I'd say it's a pretty decent proxy.
It seems clear that the worse the documentation for a language is, the more a programmer will make searches. Not a linear relation, but it is common sense.
It seems clear that the harder a language is to understand, the more a programmer will make searches. Not a linear relation, but it is common sense.
It seems clear that [reason somebody would do a search] ...
