I think that lots of people trust TIOBE's index, although it has its flaws and disadvantages.
On the basis of what? Do you? :-)
Personally, I have my doubts. Here's some food for thought:
- Looking at the first few pages of Google listing for
TIOBE I note that virtually all listings are either to (a) tiobe.com (b) simple statements of fact about the latest results - often by vested interests, i.e. language blogs tooting their language's successful position in the rankings - or (c) significant critiques of the listing. In fact, the first non-tiobe.com Google listing (at #3) is one such critique.
- More telling, after scanning several pages of Google listings I failed to find even one article showing that someone was actually making decisions based on the TIOBE index. Compare that to metrics like COCOMO.
- I sometimes like to scan my alumni print journal database to get a thumb-in-the-air sense of someone's off-line brand recognition. According to this database (a repository of 1300+ trade journals and news magazines targeted at managers), TIOBE has only four articles: three in Dr. Dobbs (2 from 2008, 1 from 2005) and one in ComputerWeek (2008). The content reflects the same trend found in the google hits: a self-promotional interview, a critical letter to the editor, and simple reporting of results. By contrast, the Gartner Group has 1407 articles, many of which use the Gartner Group results as a building block in their own independent analysis.
Best, beth
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A good method is to look at job vacancies and see what languages are required and how much the salary is.
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A good method is to look at job vacancies and see what languages are required and how much the salary is.
Looking at job vacancies gives some languages higher ratings than are probably realistic, due to the verbosity of the language. So, for example, a project that I would probably stick two programmers on if they were building it Perl, when built in Java results in 14 job openings.
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"Looking at job vacancies gives some languages higher ratings than are probably realistic, due to the verbosity of the language." When I said a good method is to look at job vacancies and see what languages are required and how much the salary is. This was a Rule of Thumb
Of course there are exceptions, that goes without saying and there are cases for all languages to be used in specific situations. But I think your statement will cause a lot of animosity in both camps if you seriously think.
1 Perl programmer = 7 Java programmers
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