If "beating a dog" has found a place in the category "achievements" in your mindset, you really should consult professional help, dear anonymous monk.

If I take part in a contest and make it 10th place, my babbling about this being a stupid contest will basically make me look like an idiot or a whining child making "the bad world" responsible for its own failure. If I make it 1st place, then my statement this being a stupid contest has far more weight.

Actually I do not think that TIOBE is completely wrong. But if someone wants to discredit it, please do so with "Perl programming" and not with "Ijustmadethatup programming". In fact, I do think there is a high correlation between it and the true popularity of a language. It certainly is not 1 but definitely more than .5

Currently, people in the Perl community ranting about e.g. TIOBE (and of course other indicators) really look more like the aforementioned 10th place people...