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Listen sonny, back in my day we had punch cards.

Let's consult the TIOBE Index for December 2015. Hrm, nope. Punch cards don't figure in the top 50 languages. Too bad. Your day is done.

"Punch cards" probably isn't considered a programming language by the TIOBE folks, and, as far as I'm concerned, they're right not to do so, just it's proper for them not to consider "paper tape" and "text file" as programming languages.

Two languages that date back to the days of punched cards, and that were often input on punched cards, however, are in the top 25 languages - COBOL at 20 and Fortran at 22 - and RPG, another such language, is at 37.

Listen sonny, back in my day we had punch cards.

Let's consult the TIOBE Index for December 2015. Hrm, nope. Punch cards don't figure in the top 50 languages. Too bad. Your day is done.

It's funny how much slashdot hates javascript, yet it is still the most popular and most used language.

JavaScript isn't even close to the most used language.

Tiobe is popularity not usage.

It's funny how much slashdot hates javascript, yet it is still the most popular and most used language.

JavaScript isn't even close to the most used language.

Stick with program managing, Justin. Actually, given you were responsible for Silverlight, find some other career entirely.

If you check Perl, Java, PHP or C++ on Indeed.com, you will see exactly the same trends.

If you perform his same terrible analysis of the TIOBE index, PHP, C++, VB.NET, Objective-C are all going to collapse. Apparently Java has been "heading for collapse" since 2004.

People who can't do statistics shouldn't report on them.

The problem does not appear to be that C# is becoming less popular (than other languages), it's appears that custom application development as a whole is becoming less popular than it was a few years ago.

This may be due to the economy, outsourcing, mobile platforms or whatever. You can't suddenly pull reasons out of your ass like this being due to "Microsoft’s ever revolving door of new technologies", despite how pissed off you are at them for shit-canning your pet project.

When doing stats on whether something is less popular, it's helpful to ask "less popular than what". Sure, it may be less popular than it used to be, but so are the competing languages. This does not indicate that the C# ecosystem is going to collapse.

The important thing to remember here is that Swift is absolutely destroying Rust.

Rust has been nothing but hype so far. Many Ruby on Rails hipsters have rallied around it, but they haven't actually managed to produce anything useful with it.

Anything that can be done using Rust can be done better by using C++.

C, C++ and Go are the dominant languages on Linux. Rust has made no inroads here.

C++ and C# are the dominant languages on Windows. Rust has made no inroads here.

Now that Swift is seeing tremendous uptake within the iOS and OS X sphere of influence, Rust has even less of a chance than it had before.

I think that Swift will be seen as the final nail in Rust's coffin. Swift has provided developers with productivity, while Rust has provided them with false hopes.

We're seeing a convergence on exactly three languages: C++, C#, and Swift. Every other language is becoming a minor player compared to these Three Giants.

According to the TIOBE Index, Java has more usage than all three of them put together. I'd hardly call it a "minor player".

Consider that in the last 30 years, the only two periods when c wasn't #1 was when c++ demoted it to #2 (1995) and java demoted it to #2 (2010).

As for the horrible gui, neither c, c++, nor objective c has a native gui (cocoa is just a library).

Is java dying? At #2, I think not.

Now, I much prefer c to java - java is over-verbose - but there are ways around that as well.

And there's the fact that Minecraft was developed in Java and it was sold for $2.5 billion. There's still big money in using the #2 language.

Check out the TIOBE index for what's happened to Ruby lately.

Dang, it dropped by 0.05%. Terrible shame.

Every few years, we have a new latest and greatest. A few years ago it was ruby on rails, then it seemed python was starting to come into it's own, and now it's node.js. At one point in time, in the mid 90's, it was actually Java. If you can imagine, Applets were actually a big deal.

Programmers flock to these in droves because, being new(ish), it attracts proselytizers who overhyper and oversell it, authors to write about it, articles about it, speakers to present it, a race to be seen as an expert in it, etc. New means 'new opportunities' so there's a rush to fill this hole that's already been filled in other languages/frameworks. Lots of activity.

All this attention, and it being new makes it a toy to play with and something to trick the boss into agreeing to use, so you have an excuse to use it. Some small number of folks will end up dealing with it for a bit, but then they drop it when something newer - and thus more interesting and exciting - comes out. Check out the TIOBE index for what's happened to Ruby lately.

But here's the real reason this isn't a battle. Java was not a language, it was a product. Every part of it was made to sell - not to developers, specifically - but to businesses. Here is an end-to-end solution, with certification, a training program, literature, professional advocates that will travel to conferences, your company, programming competitions, and local java users groups - in fact, they'll sponsor them. They'll pay for flashy commercials, and take out ads in trade magazines, and get companies to include the java logo on their software. They'll provide support contracts and expert help, and they'll push Java as a brand.

It's not a toy. It doesn't stick because it's cool and new and neat, it sticks because now there's money behind it and it's cheaper not to change much. That's why we still have Cobol around, isn't it?

So, Java's already been sold to the big dogs, the guys with money who make decisions. It's embedded into the corporate hierarchy, and outside of a few side projects and startups, it's not competing with Node.js at all. Node.js will make it's splash, and in 2 years, we'll all be jazzed about something else, while the cobal, c, c#, java, and other legacy frameworks just keep chugging along with the majority shares.

... And not sure public github or stack overflow are really as representative as they want to believe

Yeah.. why is this any better than:
TIOBE index: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php...
This story about python surpassing java as top learning language: http://developers.slashdot.org...
Or this about 5 languages you'll need to learn for the next year and on: http://news.dice.com/2014/07/2... ... those are all from the past year on slashdot, and there's loads more.

Next "top languages" post I see, I hope it just combines all the other existing stats to provide a weightable index (allow you to tweak what's most important). Maybe BH can address that :-)

"Even Microsoft has orphaned you by going with HTML5 and JavaScript for Metro interfaces. "

Microsoft had Silverlight, which was designed to compete against Flash. When the mobile platforms exploded, and both Apple and Google said, "Fsk Flash!" Microsoft saw the writing on the wall. Why continue to invest in a platform that wasn't going to be supported on the fastest growing market segment? If Microsoft had continued with Silverlight/WPF for Metro it would have been a ridiculously dumb technical decision. Going to HTML 5 and JavaScript libraries was the logical choice.

".NET is the Zune "

I believe the Zune platform was primarily C/C++, which currently blows Java out of the water for popular programming languages.

"Java is the iPod"

Lol, no. The iPod is C/Objective-C. Even the new stuff is Objective-C and Swift. Java is nothing to the Apple platform.

"Can't you see the writing on the wall?"

No, but I can see the Tiobe index: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php...

Which sure seems to point out the exact opposite. Java is losing ground, .Net framework languages are gaining. Not 1-for-1 mind you, but the trend is opposite of your bemoaning.

As for the CEO you quoted, he doesn't appear to understand what it is that the .Net framework and the JVM are actually doing. Either that, or he is expressing an opposition to all high level programming languages (.Net and Java included). In either case, it doesn't really make your point for you other than noting that someone has drank the anti-MS coolaide and is making irrational decisions based on it.

-Rick

.NET is slowly beeing weeded out of the enterprise though and that's a trend I don't want to see diminished by devs picking up .NET because it's now "open source". It's OK to hate .NET, open source or not.

You are blowing smoke with this comment. The exact opposite is happening and in a big way.

Look, I am a FreeBSD guy, but Microsoft is winning whether you think so or not. .NET is rapidly growing in the enterprise!

Why?
1. Because it is a well thought-out language that is easy to write, easy to learn.
2. Because the IDE is second to none. Visual Studio is so far ahead of anything else out there one wonders if any other IDE can catch up ever. It takes dozens of searching and finding plugins to even get Eclipse close to the same functionality and you just can't get there. Eclipse still hasn't reached VS 2008 quality let alone VS 2013 quality.
3. Everyone always says "If only we could rewrite it, it would be better." Well, .NET is basically a rewrite of Java (thanks to the Sun lawsuit). .Net is fully-backed by Microsoft who invests a ton of money into it, as apposed to Java which doesn't have as much investment. Microsoft fixed a ton of the java issues with the rewrite and haven't looked back. Java has been behind for years.
4. Microsoft has been putting out open source for years. WiX, Orchard, Entity Framework, etc...
5. The new generation doesn't hate Microsoft or Apple or anyone (OK some Linux zealots might, but not many), they just love technology and when it comes to development, .NET as a complete package including language, IDE, build tools, etc, is the best out there.
6. NuGet

So there are some misconceptions about .NET vs C#. Sites like tiobe shows a list of popular languages. However, what it doesn't show is that multiple of these languages are .NET languages. http://www.tiobe.com/index.php...

C# 4.3%
VB 1.8%
F# 0.8%
C++ - You can code in .NET with C++. It is hard to know what percent of the C++ tiobe is .NET. I would guess that it is 2%.

That means .NET is really 9% and growing.

Now, because the Surface Pro 3 is the best tablet on the market now, and selling like gangbusters, pretty soon, all those Apple and Google app developers will be moving to create new .NET versions. Well, they will find cross platform tools like Xamarin to meet their needs and suddenly they won't be coding in anything but .NET anymore.

Uptake of Swift has been kindda slow.

It's been out less than a year. Objective-C is the third most popular. Why wouldn't you believe that Objective-C developers wouldn't move over to Swift?

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php...

D's a pretty good language, if you're looking for something a little higher-level than C++ and without the C++ warts, and if you can forgive a little language instability. It's not that obscure.

(Was TIOBE always such a JavaScript-only mess?)

The TIOBE index does not agree with you at all on C/C++/Objective-C, and Pythin is almost as high as the highest places .Net thing (C#):

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php...

Also worth noting is that the downward trend in Java's market share is mirrored by downward trends in the share of other "highly popular" languages. This possibly indicates the market is becoming more diverse. TIOBE's chart goes back to June 2001, which, according to their numbers, is the high water mark for Java at 26.5%. In that month the shares for C and C++ were 20.2% and 14.2% respectively. In August 2014 Java had declined to 15.0%. C and C++ declined to 16.4% and 4.7% respectively. Woe is C++. In fact, of the top ten languages in 2014 the only ones to gain market share over the past year are Javascript and Objective-C. Javascript has been more or less flat; Objective-C spiked earlier this year but has since dropped back to 2013 levels.

Python? Peaked in February 2011 when it reached 7.0% in TIOBE's index. It's currently sitting at 3.1% in August 2014.

Ruby? Peaked at 4.0% in December 2008. Currently at 1.2% in August 2014.

I can't get info on Scala, Go, Haskell, Scheme, Erlang, Groovy, et. al. because they aren't used widely enough for TIOBE to even report stats.

Also worth noting is that the downward trend in Java's market share is mirrored by downward trends in the share of other "highly popular" languages. This possibly indicates the market is becoming more diverse. TIOBE's chart goes back to June 2001, which, according to their numbers, is the high water mark for Java at 26.5%. In that month the shares for C and C++ were 20.2% and 14.2% respectively. In August 2014 Java had declined to 15.0%. C and C++ declined to 16.4% and 4.7% respectively. Woe is C++. In fact, of the top ten languages in 2014 the only ones to gain market share over the past year are Javascript and Objective-C. Javascript has been more or less flat; Objective-C spiked earlier this year but has since dropped back to 2013 levels.

Python? Peaked in February 2011 when it reached 7.0% in TIOBE's index. It's currently sitting at 3.1% in August 2014.

Ruby? Peaked at 4.0% in December 2008. Currently at 1.2% in August 2014.

I can't get info on Scala, Go, Haskell, Scheme, Erlang, Groovy, et. al. because they aren't used widely enough for TIOBE to even report stats.

Java is moving into archaic irrelevance faster than ever.

This seems like it should be quantifiable. That is, you seem to be saying that the rate of decrease in Java's popularity is at an all time high. The slope of its decline is steeper than its ever been, so to speak. Do the popularity metrics bear out that claim? After some cursory googling, the TIOBE rankings are the only one I could find online that has historical data. If you look at their chart it looks like Java's rate of decline in market share is approximately linear, with a fair amount of fluctuation. If you focus only on the period from April 2014 to August 2014 then the decline is indeed rather steep, but it's no steeper than, say, the period from February 2013 to July 2013. So while Java may indeed be waning (gradually) I'm calling B.S. on the claim that it's "moving into archaic irrelevance faster than ever".

Whether with programming languages or with studies it's the same: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Select mobile, and you'll find Objective-C listed 16th, 6 places after MATLAB, and two places after Visual Basic. Which is clearly nonsense.

We already have tried and tested (back to 1989!) rankings for this. http://www.tiobe.com/index.php... And Objective-C is currently number three across the board, never mind just mobile.

The filters are meaningless because they just hide the languages that are not classed as being used in that space, they don't actually measure usage in that space. When you hide all but mobile they're still ranking the languages by overall use, not use in the mobile space. So C# is at 4th despite it having almost no use in the mobile space.

Whether with programming languages or with studies it's the same: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Select mobile, and you'll find Objective-C listed 16th, 6 places after MATLAB, and two places after Visual Basic. Which is clearly nonsense.

We already have tried and tested (back to 1989!) rankings for this. http://www.tiobe.com/index.php...
And Objective-C is currently number three across the board, never mind just mobile.

I develop in a mixed environment software shop, and VB is the workhorse language nobody admits to knowing, but uses to automate their office tasks.

The worst part is when some of these macros take a life of their own. I'm certain our documentation team justify their existence by writing more and more Word doc conversion scripts.

Whether with programming languages or with studies it's the same: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Select mobile, and you'll find Objective-C listed 16th, 6 places after MATLAB, and two places after Visual Basic. Which is clearly nonsense.

We already have tried and tested (back to 1989!) rankings for this. http://www.tiobe.com/index.php...
And Objective-C is currently number three across the board, never mind just mobile.

I Prefer this broader index: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php...

Not much chance of that. F# just hit #12 on the Tiobe Index, up from #69 this time last year:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php...

Have a look here: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php...

Hint: The blue line at the top or close to it that shows no decline is C. But that may be too complicated for you to understand.

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php...

C is still the undisputed king of enterprise, and growing.
Java has about 3x the adoption of C#. Both are declining. C# peaked in 2012 and is plummeting.

Finally there, like C# and .Net, there is a big difference between Java and the JVM. You are right that for many things C# the language is better (though fuck the eco system) then Java. However the JVM is amazing.

Watch out for Scala. Its actually starting to woo C devs.

In the domain of language in which Ruby plays, I'd say Python has by far the brightest future.

Some graphs from google trends: ruby programming, python programming and php programming. Which one of these things is not like the others? (Hint: Python).

TIOBE data, questionable as it is.

Search for jobs at LinkedIn:

Ruby: 112 results
Python: 5,151 results
PHP: 3,046 results

And the "programmer perception" survey Berkeley did a while back (that I think was covered at Slashdot). Check out the results for the question "This language is likely to be around for a very long time".

On MC68xxx it was possible and was being done. It could also be done on Intel, but that assembler model is so cluelessly complex, the language is a real issue. "Content rich" has nothing to do with it.

As to C, competent people are using it, no need to hold the boat. Just realize that all those that can only do Java are not competent programmers. Also, C coders are highly sought after, see, e.g. http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

Code reviews I have done confirm this, Java programmers are making the most clueless mistakes and are doing the least research when they actually need to code logic themselves. My explanation is that they are so used to just call libraries that they never learn any real programming. C coders cannot do that and hence more of them do understand time and space complexity, algorithms, efficiency and think before coding. That is not to say all C coders are good.

With 32 languages in higher demand than D as of this month, I'm not sure that's a particularly wise investment of my time.

I'll believe it when I see it here.

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

So you like to suggest that I suggest to the amazon CTO that we do the next system upgrades in D ?

"Nobody ever got fired for choosing Java", right? Fair point, but you asked What other language/platform is out there that could rival Java, and I submit that the C#/CLI language/platform pair, and the D language, could. They're by no means a million miles away from Java; if we look at the broader spectrum of programming languages, the three are pretty close.

There are so many D programmers?

Again, fair point: D ranks at 37 on TIOBE, where Java is in second place to C. It depends what you mean by could rival Java, really; if you are asking for a language with considerable pre-existing adoption, that's of course quite different from the technical side, which is what I was looking at.

And we already have a D compiler for the AS400 and the IBM Mainframes?

For funky platforms, Java will beat D, of course. For the major server/desktop platforms (Lin/Win/Mac), D should work (though it generally focuses on Windows), but yes, Java certainly wins on implementation maturity.

And it gives us over Java ... what exactly? A servlet framework?

It gives you a language which rivals Java. Basing my decision purely on language preference, I'd choose D over Java.

D is a language, not a platform.

It's a little fuzzy what this means - D doesn't have a security model like Java does, sure, but as I understand it, CLI doesn't have one either. Compilation is fully ahead-of-time, also. This doesn't rule out D from doing some of the things Java is used for, though.

..I don't know that I would recommend Javascript myself. It's finally cracked the top 10 at Tiobe and it's definitely growing. However, it's still not exactly mainstream. It's also inherently limited to a narrow development niche. The GP could choose to dive into some sort of mix of C, C++, ObjectiveC, Perl, and/or Python instead. S/he would probably have more success out of the gate because all of those languages have a broad applicability to a much larger set of use cases.

However, I think the larger point you're trying to make is a valid one. The rate of change isn't slowing down for anyone. These days nobody in IT can afford to be a one trick pony. In order to stay relevant in the market, developers need to have more than a passing familiarity in several languages and environments. At minimum they should be competent in at least a couple and reviewing one or two others. (What? You thought you were done studying when you got out of college?)

Or just don't worry about flattering the ego of people so insecure and unskilled that they require you to pretend that Ruby is a widely used, mature, stable language.

You want the advice of someone who learns languages effortlessly, and therefore has no insecurity about anyone else's preferences or prejudices. Anyone who needs you to "control your tone" about a language "because it puts food on their children's table" - I fear for those children. And for anyone who gets advice from their parents, who apparently had to struggle a bit too much to pull themselves up to that competency and, fearing criticism of their precious, hard-won skill, give the impression of hanging on by their fingernails.

Ruby is indeed still at risk of being described as a toy language, and it is not nearly as commonly used as, say Perl, Python, Visual Basic, or even C#, let alone Objective C, C/C++ or Java, (as evidenced here) ...and the community is similarly small. Witness the hilarity around the recent Rubygems compromise to see the price of small size and lack of maturity. The language is still young, and messily and poorly specified, relying on a horrifyingly slow, rats-nest reference implementation for its definition, rather than a comprehensive design.

There is great cleverness in Ruby. It represents a ruthless preference for developer productivity over performance. An interesting experiment, but unfortunately it was done "by feel" rather than with any hard data about speed or defect rates given different design decisions. So, while some things about it are wonderful, other things only appear to be wonderful. On the whole you are unlikely to experience much net gain over Perl or Python, though you may enjoy the novelty of it. It's a fun language. By all means, try, and see for yourself. Just beware that you foreclose the ability to scale your work easily if you use Ruby.

Although some very clever Ruby runtime implementers have come along to pick up the slack left by the language's founder (who still pretends the global interpreter lock is a virtue, or so I am told), many language features cause meaningful and irretrievable performance impacts that will never be ameliorated by runtime magic. It doesn't matter for many applications, but just something to keep in mind.

Copyleft-only languages have no chance, particularly among languages intended to be embedded in applications. Permissively licensed alternatives to Guile among Scheme implementations seem to include: Gauche, Ypsilon, TinyScheme, Scheme 48, Owl, and the SCheme SHell (scsh).

And of course Scheme itself is dwarfed, in terms of both popularity and performance by other languages. Haskell seems to be the best overall functional language at the moment, and, when choosing a scripting / macro-language without a commitment to functional languages, better alternatives would be Lua (made faster than Scheme by LuaJIT), JavaScript / CoffeeScript (V8), and Ruby (Topaz).

--libman

C is the clear winner. Maybe that why its 1 number in TIOBE Programming Community Index However choice of programming language has a lot to do with what you want to do. If you want to create jobs to processing millions of records locally, C/C++ would be better. If you want to have secure web based jobs, Java would be better. If you want to create Windows GUI applications, C# would be better. Basically its horses for courses.

I took a comparative programming languages course in college. For the most part it was a waste, but one thing that did strike me as particularly amazing was when we were tasked with doing a bunch of calculations in several languages. FORTRAN77 was an order of magnitude faster, at least for that particular application (can't remember exactly what the calculation was).

C is the clear winner. Maybe that why its 1 number in TIOBE Programming Community Index

However choice of programming language has a lot to do with what you want to do.
If you want to create jobs to processing millions of records locally, C/C++ would be better.
If you want to have secure web based jobs, Java would be better.
If you want to create Windows GUI applications, C# would be better.

Basically its horses for courses.

Premature celebration much?

....

Trends show that it's just a random spike in C's index, which is pretty much gone now.

It doesn't look like a "random spike to me" - quite the contrary - the trend graph appears to show that C's popularity has hardly changed in the last decade

I think it's significant that lower powered devices such as Arduinos are starting to become more popular, and C is the natural if not the only choice for a lot of these types of chips.

Premature celebration much?

....

Trends show that it's just a random spike in C's index, which is pretty much gone now.

It doesn't look like a "random spike to me" - quite the contrary - the trend graph appears to show that C's popularity has hardly changed in the last decade (going up and down between 15% and 20%), while Java's popularity sunk in the last decade (from 27% to 17%) and C++ also showing a steady decline (from 17% to 10%). Perhaps a "random spike" caused C to surpass Java this year, but the trend is obvious - Java will soon be dethroned.

Without the middle-man:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

Correlation != causation, I know, but check these two graphs (and note popularity and top search word for second one).

The ratings are calculated by counting hits of the most popular search engines. The search query that is used is +"[language] programming"

So they counted desperate queries of unemployed C programmers as "popularity index".

Premature celebration much?

Well, it's partially due to summary linking to some shitty blog instead of actual TIOBE page which gives more than just places and up/down arrows.

Trends show that it's just a random spike in C's index, which is pretty much gone now. I also suspect that Bash's sudden popularity boost is due to TIOBE's statistics shittiness - check how it suddenly jumps in one month of Feb 2012. I've got an inkling that it might have to do with bash.org-like quote sites, here's one coincidentally(?) getting new domain in the same timeframe - and it's pretty high in searches, what with it being one of top 500 popular sites in Russia and top 5000 worldwide.

Premature celebration much?

Well, it's partially due to summary linking to some shitty blog instead of actual TIOBE page which gives more than just places and up/down arrows.

Trends show that it's just a random spike in C's index, which is pretty much gone now. I also suspect that Bash's sudden popularity boost is due to TIOBE's statistics shittiness - check how it suddenly jumps in one month of Feb 2012. I've got an inkling that it might have to do with bash.org-like quote sites, here's one coincidentally(?) getting new domain in the same timeframe - and it's pretty high in searches, what with it being one of top 500 popular sites in Russia and top 5000 worldwide.

Premature celebration much?

Well, it's partially due to summary linking to some shitty blog instead of actual TIOBE page which gives more than just places and up/down arrows.

Trends show that it's just a random spike in C's index, which is pretty much gone now. I also suspect that Bash's sudden popularity boost is due to TIOBE's statistics shittiness - check how it suddenly jumps in one month of Feb 2012. I've got an inkling that it might have to do with bash.org-like quote sites, here's one coincidentally(?) getting new domain in the same timeframe - and it's pretty high in searches, what with it being one of top 500 popular sites in Russia and top 5000 worldwide.

Seriously, for the last fucking time, can we stop posting on Slashdot random shit picked up from TIOBE? The TIOBE index is so completely and utterly full of fail that I can't believe people are STILL clinging onto it as evidence of anything whatsoever.

It shouldn't be traditional to do anything with TIOBE, except perhaps laugh at it or set it on fire.

So once last time, one final fucking time I'll try and explain to the 'tards who think it has any merit whatsoever why it absolutely does not.

We start here, with the TIOBE index definition, the horses mouth explanation of how they cludge together this table of bollocks they call and "index":

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/tpci_definition.htm

First, there is their definition of programming language. They require two criteria, these are:

1) That the language have an entry on Wikipedia

2) That the language be Turing complete

This means that if I go and delete the Wikipedia entry on C, right this moment, it is no longer a programming language, and hence no longer beating anything. Apparently.

The next step, is to scroll past the big list of languages, to the ratings section, where we see that they state they take the top 9 sites on Alexa that have a search option, and they execute the search:

+" programming"

Then weight the results as follows:

Google: 30%
Blogger: 30%
Wikipedia: 15%
YouTube: 9%
Baidu: 6%
Yahoo!: 3%
Bing: 3%
Amazon: 3%

The first problem here is with search engines like Google, I run this query against C++ and note the following:

"About 21,500,000 results"

In other words, Google's figure is hardly anything like a reasonable estimate because a) Most these results are fucking bollocks, and b) The number is at best a ballpark - this accounts for 30% of the weighting.

The next problem is that Blogger, Wikipedia, and YouTube account for 54% of the weighting. These are all sites that have user generated content, as such you could literally, right now, pick one of the lowest languages on the list, and go create a bunch of fake accounts, talking about it, and turn it into the fastest growing language of the moment quite trivially.

To cite an example, I just ran their query on English Wikipedia for the PILOT programming language and got one result. A few fake or modified Wikipedia entries later and tada, suddenly PILOT has grown massively in popularity.

The next point is the following:

"Possible false positives for a query are already filtered out in the definition of "hits(PL,SE)". This is done by using a manually determined confidence factor per query."

In other words yes, they apply an utterly arbitrary decision to each language about what does and doesn't count. Or to put it simply, they apply a completely arbitrary factor in which you can have no confidence of being of any actual worth. I say this because further down they have a list of terms they filter out manually, they have a list of the confidence factors they use, and it takes little more than a second to realise massive gaps and failings in these confidence factors.

For example, they have 100% confidence in the language "Scheme" with the exceptions "tv", and "channel" - I mean really? the word Scheme wouldn't possibly used for anything else? Seriously?

So can we finally put to bed the idea that TIOBE tells us anything of any value whatsoever? As I've pointed out before a far better methodology would at least taken into account important programming sites like Stack Overflow, but ideally you'd simply refer to job advert listings on job sites across the globe - these will tell you far more about what languages are sought after, what languages are being used, and what languages are growing in popularity than any of this shit.

Finally I do recall last year stumbling across a competitor to TIOBE that was at least slightly better but still not ap

Yes, people are using Ada, in fact, it's been making a quiet comeback. Ada is the #16 most popular language according to the TIOBE programming language survey of November and December 2012, an increase from #19 in November 2011. Keller reports that by 2000 Ada use had decreased and then increased again. It's not huge compared to C or Java, of course; its use is focused in certain domains. In certain communities, such as aviation software, it continues to be a popular language and has been credited with helping to produce high-quality software within time and budget.

Historically, Ada was developed by the Department of Defense (DoD), and the DoD tried to make it the one and only universal language . An NRC report on Ada talks about this. Fundamentally, trying to make one language do everything was a bad idea, and predictably failed; there is still no one language that can be all things to all people, even many years later.

Ada isn't a complex language by today's standards, but it has a lot of "pickiness" that means you have to obey more rules. Is that a good thing? Well, you first have to understand what it was designed for - and then decide if that design is what you want.

Ada focuses on software that needs high reliability and yet absolutely no compromise of performance. If reliability isn't really all that important to you, or you can give up a lot of performance, then Ada's trade-offs may not work for you. For reliability, it has a strong typing system, and you have to use generics (etc.) instead of just saying "shut up and trust me" a la C. For performance, it doesn't mandate automatic garbage collection (as compared to Java or Python). Ada shines when you're writing programs that will could un-intentionally kill people if the program is wrong or takes too long. Think airplane flight controls, train systems, medical systems, that sort of thing. A lot of Slashdot readers have never tried to write software that could accidentally kill people, and thus can't understand why you might want a "picky" language like Ada. If your response to "it has a bug" is just "install this patch" maybe another language would be fine. But when mistakes can kill, having a language that helps prevent them can be literally a lifesaver.

The TIOBE language popularity index says Ada is holding steady in 16th place - actually up from 24th place 5 years ago, but down from being the second most popular language (after C) 25 years ago.

According to The Great Programming Language ShootOut (recently renamed to The Benchmarks Game), Ada is almost as fast as C (then again, so are Pascal and Fortran), but it's also the most verbose language in the comparison!

Unsurprising, given how much them lazy overpaid government contract moochers hate efficiency...

Also note that there doesn't seem to be a genuinely free implementation of Ada... (Note that LLVM DragonEgg is still based on GPLv3'ed GCC, puke.)

The only thing to like about that language is its name!

--libman

"Languages such as Java, C/C++, C#, PHP, and Visual Basic are FAR FAR FAR more commonly used than Ruby or Python. Those two are niche languages by almost anyone's definition."

Not so. Ruby continues to become more popular, and is already significantly ahead of JavaScript, .NET (except C#), LISP, etc. I don't see you can call anything in TIOBE's "A" list a "niche" product.

Ruby has moved down a notch in the list since 2007, but that's just because Objective-C suddenly jumped into the A list, near the top. Other languages like PHP and .NET (again, except for C# in particular) have gone down 2 or more notches during the same period.

Correction. There was a typographical error in that first link. It should have been:

The TIOBE Index

Some people say Perl is a write-only language that is slowly losing importance in comparison to Python. It seems that it is the CPAN library that is important, not the Perl language.

With all due respect to your unixbeardedness, your statement has very little to do with the point I was making. We are comparing open source UNIX to open source UNIX, and what factors influenced the relative success of one OS over an other. The roots of the early success of Linux were the i386 "home users" with some blank floppies, who were far more numerous than people with access to corporate mainframes or university labs. I am explaining why those early adopters of Linux didn't go for BSD instead - BSD simply wasn't on their radar. Linux got there first, and when you've got one kernel you don't need another. (GNU's favoritism of Linux over BSD due to licensing bias is a separate issue.)

GNU was open-source (though restrictively-licensed) since its inception in 1983/4, and Linux from 1991. BSD was entangled in legal FUD until January 1994 , by which time we had not only Linux but also Slackware, Debian, etc. (To some people BSD's "obnoxious advertising clause" was even more of a turn-off than Linux's copyLEFT, and BSD didn't become fully compliant with copyFREE standards until 1999, but that's a side-issue.) So it was in January of 1994 when BSD became a contender, while Linux "went viral" among the home geek crowd in 1993.

Linus himself had said that if 386BSD had been available (i.e. free of AT&T legal uncertainty) at the time, he probably would not have created Linux. (And it didn't become fully free of legal FUD until a few months after that interview was published.) In that same interview, Linus also mentions other reasons that worked against BSD: higher hardware requirements, "lack of co-ordination", bad approach to release engineering, etc.

Switching kernels (which also meant switching file-systems, kernel-dependent system components, etc) has always been very difficult. Switching Web browsers is much easier, and its (mostly) BSD license didn't keep Chromium from leapfrogging over Firefox. Apache httpd wasn't the least bit handicapped by its non-copyLEFT (though not entirely copyFREE) license (in fact the "got there first" advantage of Apache has kept out decent GPL'ed Web servers like Cherokee), and it's now gradually yielding ground to the fully-copyFREE nginx. Among scripting languages, lisp (the most popular scripting language of the 80s, also Stallman's favorite) was overshadowed by weaker-copyLEFT perl, which in turn was leapfrogged by even-less-uncopyFREE python / php, and which are now being leapfrogged by fully-copyFREE node.js / ruby / etc. Apple's recent choices leave no doubt that GPL has handicapped the popularity of mysql and gcc.

Conclusion: The conjecture that FreeBSD was hurt by its license is baseless, buried under a mountain of more plausible handicaps in the history of FreeBSD's development, and is utterly contradicted in most other software categories!

--libman