Re: Tiobe language index

I don't know how anyone can place any stock in an index that says JavaScript has declined in the past year, and currently ranks lower than Perl. There is scarcely a web-page served (with the exception of here at the Monastery) that doesn't contain <script> tags. And that doesn't even count the other uses of JavaScript such as Node.JS, driving Selenium, and so on. Sure, we love Perl, but for Tiobe to show a decline for JavaScript, and to rank it outside of the top-5, I think, shows that the index lacks relevance. I even looked to see if the index possibly has an entry for ECMAScript that might be consuming some of JavaScript's stats, but found no such entry, though the Tiobe explanation page does mention ECMAScript as one of the languages tracked.

StackOverflow currently shows 199.6k followers of the Javascript tag, and 12k followers of the Perl tag. It seems to me Tiobe is tracking data that has a low correlation to what people take the index to be an indicator for.

Dave

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Re^2: Tiobe language index by KurtSchwind (Chaplain) on Feb 09, 2016 at 13:33 UTC
The Tiobe index is sort of like the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It's largely irrelevant except that it has lots and lots of historical data points. So all other measures you can think of are shorter term. I agree that javascript would be top dog in terms of language use. It is 100% ubiquitous. In a lot of ways, javascript was able to deliver on a promise made by java to 'write once, run anywhere'. -- “For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.” - CS Lewis	[reply]
Re^3: Tiobe language index by davido (Cardinal) on Feb 10, 2016 at 04:15 UTC
This is a good point, but the DJIA has booted out one stock and replaced it with another about 50 times during its history. It does this when an existing stock is deemed to no longer be sufficiently representative of the type of tracking the DJIA intended to maintain, and another is found that is a better representation of the DJIA's mission. Tiobe may also update their data set from time to time, but if they do, they've somehow allowed it to lose relevancy anyway. Dave	[reply]
Re^2: Tiobe language index by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Feb 09, 2016 at 01:47 UTC
Nice call out. Their data are clearly blatherskite.	[reply]


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