Publicity (was: Re: Why is 2.0 in the works already?)

[Don Clugston]

David B. Held wrote:
> Lars Ivar Igesund wrote:
>> Anders Bergh wrote:
>>
>>> On 6/19/07, Lars Ivar Igesund <larsivar at igesund.net> wrote:
>>>> The only reason to worry about TIOBE, is that high rankings may boost
>>>> knowledge about D. As is rather obvious by looking at the list, D's
>>>> numbers are most likely highly inflated, and a reason for this is
>>>> suggested at
>>>>
>>>> http://cdsmith.wordpress.com/2007/06/18/is-tiobe-fatally-flawed/
>>> I just read that post, and scrolling down to the comments makes the
>>> post less notable. Google apparently cuts results at 1000 results, and
>>> removes duplicates, shrinking the numbers which caused his search
>>> results to be even more flawed than TIOBE's.
>>
>> Yes, his ranking was definately wrong too, don't necessarily make TIOBE's
>> more correct though :) If TIOBE use Google, the argumentation would 
>> affect
>> them too in some form.
> 
> TIOBE's rankings are certainly suspect, but all the hoopla about Google 
> is just wrong.  Google does not remove "duplicate" hits, because it does 
> not index duplicate hits.  That would be a stupid search engine. 
> Instead, it removes pages that look like they came from the same site 
> and possibly the same area of a site, and thus, may not present 
> interesting new information to the user.  A simple example is searching 
> for a term that happens to be on the footer of a bunch of pages on a 
> site.  The hits are not "dupes", but they aren't interesting, either.
> 
> Clearly, assuming that all result sets are < 1000 is just silly, and the 
> blogger should have known better.  The estimated Google hit counts are 
> probably accurate within an order of magnitude, based on various 
> searches I've done where I compared the initial hit count to what Google 
>  says after I've forced it to do an exact count (by visiting all the 
> pages).  So the TIOBE page counts are probably fairly reasonable.  What 
> is not reasonable is any interpretation of those results that mentions 
> "popularity", "buzz", "community", or "zeitgeist".  Even less reasonable 
> is any assumption that languages near the top of the list are "better" 
> than those not near the top for anything but a narrow and specific 
> definition of "better".
> 
> Dave

And despite what Tiobe says, it's certainly not an indication of "mainstreamness".
Just look at the graph for Fortran shows how meaningless the Tiobe ranking is.
It ought to be one of the most stable languages on the list. Yet according to 
Tiobe, it's dropped by a factor of 3 since 2003. It's nonsense.