TIOBE December 2015 - D rose 5 positions

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 3 January 2016 at 16:56:46 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> It's more than not being neutral: I pointed out that github 
> suffers from similar categorization errors to the ones you list 
> below.  But yes, github stats are really only good for 
> languages used in open source, and OSS is still a small 
> fraction of all software written.

I didn't notice any miscategorization in the trending lists I 
used, there might have been some, but even then the surrounding 
numbers were similar at #20 of the monthly trend so I don't think 
that the numbers would be significantly effected for most 
languages.

Open source is a good indicator of trending. It is also a 
indicator for the productivity of new languages when a new 
language produce many popular open source applications. It is 
also a good indicator of what programming areas a new language is 
going to be popular in. If a language has a long tail of popular 
applications, that's a pretty strong indicator that it will take 
off, IMO. Go is there. Rust isn't quite there (yet). D and Nim 
doesn't show any signs of going there (yet).

> Are you stating that Docker is built on Go or suggesting it 
> would make sense if they were?  Sounds like the latter.

Docker is based on Go.

«Under the hood, Docker is built on the following components:

The cgroups and namespaces capabilities of the Linux kernel
The Go programming language
The Docker Image Specification
The Libcontainer Specification»

> for the long-term future of D.  Better to focus on making the 
> best language you can, and people will find uses for its unique 
> strengths.

Yes, but the trends show that D has been going down over the past 
8 years and has been stagnant over the past 2 years if you look 
at statistics for github and google trends.

So, D has to make a change. Most likely a language change that 
makes it easier to deal with. People say that Go and Swift are 
doing well because they are easy to deal with. I think they are 
right.

> Heh, why should I spend any time thinking about it whatsoever?

It doesn't take any thinking to see that Tiobe is bogus! ;^)

> all.  Since practically every company has a website that likely 
> uses a little javascript, that's trivially true, yet completely 
> irrelevant.

First we need to define what we want to measure. But claiming 
that the marketshare of Javascript is 2.5% is outragous no matter 
how we measure it.

> If you were able to compile something like billable hours for 
> javascript, it would do well, but nowhere near the top.

I think it would be on the top now, yes.

> Unfortunately, that key is not available under the lamppost we 
> have: TIOBE. :)

A broken lamppost without electricity that went out of date over 
a decade ago.

> C++ has been retreating into a niche, along with other 
> AoT-compiled languages, even TIOBE shows that in its graph of 
> C++ buzz dropping significantly over the last decade.

C++ is going down slowly, but probably will reach a plateu with 
enterprises that can afford "large" C++ teams.

> javascript is primarily a frontend language on a single 
> platform, web apps, it will never get "close to the top" of the 
> programming language heap.

I wish. Unfortunately this isn't true anymore. Electron, node.js 
and other frameworks are projecting JavaScript as a VM into more 
and more application areas.

We are just not following the youngsters. They grew up with 
JavaScript. They will make it pervasive.