Headline: C++ is about to surpass C
[…]
Elsewhere in the TIOBE index, we see that COBOL, after a long time, re-enters the top 20, while Julia is seriously approaching it.
So Julia is approaching COBOL, in goodness with 1.9…? Or just its rank.
We can agree on that. However, this can be a nice signal for those who actually believe the index is valuable and the top 20 languages are somehow worth picking up.
I can live with the idea of people “arriving in Julia community for the index, staying for the language”.
TIOBE gets some kind of broad strokes correct. It consistently ranks C and Python above Forth and Logo. Perl has trended strongly downward in the past 20 years, and Python strongly upward.
Click on the percents to see the history for the languages. The high frequency components are clearly noise. And it’s pretty noisy. For languages like Julia, their measurements show signal and noise of comparable size. (click to see, also, I don’t see a button for some languages, but you can edit the url by hand).
Between last November and last month, they show Python popularity dropped by 30%. We shouldn’t assign any significance to that.
Furthermore, their methodology has some built in biases that can be hard to measure.
For example in some languages its common to refer to “X scripting” in addition to “X programming”. The former does not count.
Or, “I’ve heard about sql queries, I’d like to learn what a query is and how to do it”. I find the same order of magnitude of hits for “sql programming” and “sql query”.
Lots of other things have been pointed out: For example, their time kernel for computing popularity is flat.
Another item which has probably been mentioned, but I don’t recall seeing it: Languages target, or have grown into, different markets. And markets have varying sizes.