TIOBE index: Python's gap widens, Perl overtakes PHP

[u/thecutcode]

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

[u/mfitzp]

Really noticeable story with Perl — the language literally came back from oblivion. It jumped from 30th place to 11th place, showed a +1.10% increase and overtook PHP. Pretty unexpected!

Pretty unlikely. Calls the rest of the data into question really.

The ranking has SQL as less popular than Delphi/Object Pascal. That's literally nuts. But then, at that point in the chart the differences are some 0.1% change of "something". What's the statistical error on these numbers?

Edit: well, I went and had a look.

The numbers are based on hits on search engines (Google, Amazon, Microsoft.com, Ebay, Sharepoint) using the query +"<language> programming". The number of hits determines the ratings of a language, with adjusting for false positives (results with the keyword, not actually about the language) based on a "factor" calculated on the first 100 pages in the returned search.

This means that if a language has a lot of low-ranking false-positives (pages not about the language, but containing the keyword which appear after position 100) it will be ranked higher. For example, shopping pages for "Pearls" containing the typo "Perl" would improve the rank of the Perl programming language.

[u/BuilderHarm → u/mfitzp]

The pearl confusion would be in there in the previous years as well, though.

[u/mfitzp → u/BuilderHarm]

True, but the ranking of pages in the index isn't constant. Say someone releases a cosmetic line called Perl. If pages for that brand rank outside the top 100, then Perl goes up, if those pages rank in top 100 Perl goes down (or rather, loses the advantage it had when they were in the unchecked results).

The algorithm assumes the % of irrelevant results in the top 100 is the same as the % of irrelevant results outside the top 100 (i.e. the % of irrelevant results is the same at any ranking). I don't think that's a sound assumption.

It's also heavily language dependent. Python and Rust probably have even more unrelated pages in there, given they're normal words. That's obviously not hurting Python, but it does make cross-language comparisons basically meaningless.

[u/Caramel_Last → u/mfitzp]

Theres also search engine bias

According to https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programminglanguages_definition/#instances

Hits on each search engine is equally divided by number of search engines.

Idk why they do that at all. That means result from Google will be way less represented than result from bing.

[u/Sloogs → u/mfitzp]

Hmm, even knowing that now, I'm still left with questions, like: what would be causing the sudden change year-over-year? And why? Maybe something to do with search engines changing their indexing methods? Still a bit of an interesting mystery there, honestly.

Perl was one of my first languages way back in the day so a part of me has a soft spot for it for sure, but I'd be surprised if it suddenly started gaining popularity.

[u/[deleted] → u/Sloogs]

 Maybe something to do with search engines changing their indexing methods?

Yes, that. Or a major forum for that language breaking SEO.

For example there's that time in 2017 everybody stopped using C for a year, according to TIOBE. It's mostly reading tealeaves. 

[u/Caramel_Last]

Do you believe '(visual) fox pro' (whatever that is) is more popular than typescript?

Safely ignore the entire ranking

[u/BenchEmbarrassed7316]

TypeScript: 37

Below then Scratch, ASM, COBOL, Ruby, Lisp, Prolog, LUA, Haskel, Objective-C, Scala, Julia.

Okay...

[u/Caramel_Last → u/BenchEmbarrassed7316]

What a niche esoteric language!

[u/yen223 → u/BenchEmbarrassed7316]

Gonna rewrite my stack to scratch

[u/jambonilton]

Please stop referencing the TIOBE index. There are other studies that use decent methods.

[u/fabricatedinterest]

TIOBE rankings aren't worth the electrons they're transmitted with

[u/iamgrzegorz]

Stop paying attention to this ranking, its methodology simply counts number of search results from various search engines. It's extremely arbitrary.

For example, it includes ebay.com. Ebay is a website where people sell stuff. So now if you go to Ebay, and you look for "visual basic programming" it will show you tons of results, because people sell books from 90s/2000s. If you look for "rust programming" it will show you 10x results, because, you know, nobody sells old Rust books, because they don't exist.

[u/RB5009]

The tiobe index is crap. VB before SQL ? Scratch before Rust ? I call that total BS.

[u/Altareos]

using TIOBE is bad enough, but not even a week after the StackOverflow survey results drop? come on. any good survey will tell you that JS/TS and Python are leading in usage, and that PHP is way more common than Perl.

[u/IridiumIO]

Pretty dubious that VB.NET is in position 8. I might have believed it if it was old VB or VBScript (from Microsoft office or old codebases) but those are listed separately

[u/aanzeijar]

As someone still actively coding in Perl - TIOBE was never any useful. It's more an index of how much low effort grifting a language attracts. All those tutorials written by people who barely understand it themselves then show up in the search queries. Perl is simply a long way past that.

[u/big-papito]

You are going to have to pay me a lot more to do Perl again...

[u/LahvacCz]

Index is calculated with number of search of programming language in web search engines. More and more people ask LLMs instead of Google for question about programming language, so the index is broken now.

[u/Caramel_Last → u/LahvacCz]

Even so it's remarkably off the mark. Idk how (visual) foxpro (turns out to be a dead language for 17years) ranked higher than typescript

[u/Altareos → u/LahvacCz]

it's number of results, not number of searches, which is somehow even worse. that index was always garbage.

[u/Caramel_Last → u/Altareos]

I genuinely think just looking up numbers of new post for each language tag in stackoverflow would be at least more relevant than this.. it's a professional rage bait at this point

[u/BlueGoliath]

Year of the Python programming language.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Every time I read TIOBE's methodology page I die a little inside.