Christopher Diggins

Dr. Dobb's Bloggers

Why the TIOBE Programming Language Index is No Good

April 26, 2008

Many people on the net point to TIOBE as if it were a definitive index of programming language popularity. As it is currently defined, it is utter nonsense.


Many people on the net point to TIOBE as if it were a definitive index of programming language popularity. As it is currently defined, it is utter nonsense.

From the TIOBE index definition at http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/tpci_definition.htm

The ratings are calculated by counting hits of the most popular search engines. The search query that is used is

+"<language> programming"

The search query is executed for the regular Google, Google Blogs, MSN, Yahoo!, and YouTube web search for the last 12 months. The web site Alexa.com has been used to determine the most popular search engines

So what's wrong with that? Well on the index page they claim:

The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors.

Do I really need to say much more than that?

Related Reading

News

Commentary

Most Popular

On the Web

Slideshow

Video

More Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>
INFO-LINK




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Dr. Dobb's encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Dr. Dobb's moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing or spam. Dr. Dobb's further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
 

Best of the Web

First C Compiler Now on Github

The earliest known C compiler by the legendary Dennis Ritchie has been published on the repository.

Quick Read

HTML5 Mobile Development: Seven Good Ideas (and Three Bad Ones)

HTML5 Mobile Development: Seven Good Ideas (and Three Bad Ones)

Quick Read

Building Bare Metal ARM Systems with GNU

All you need to know to get up and running... and programming on ARM

Quick Read

Amazon's Vogels Challenges IT: Rethink App Dev

Amazon Web Services CTO says promised land of cloud computing requires a new generation of applications that follow different principles.

Quick Read

How to Select a PaaS Partner

Eventually, the vast majority of Web applications will run on a platform-as-a-service, or PaaS, vendor's infrastructure. To help sort out the options, we sent out a matrix with more than 70 decision points to a variety of PaaS providers.

Quick Read


More "Best of the Web" >>



Design Recent Articles

Most Popular

Stories Blogs

Video

View All Videos

Upcoming Events



Most Recent Premium Content

Digital Issues