Toiby; #14 an rising

[David Wilson]

Does somebody know of reasons to trust TIOBE? I see this posted
regularly as some sort of "proof" that D is becoming more popular, but
at best it looks like some definition of "buzz" surrounding a
language.

Counting search engine hits is practically useless as the search
engines themselves typically (always?) estimate the total number of
hits for a given query as computing the actual number is potentially
very expensive.

Compare the number of hits listed:

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%22D+Programming+Language%22
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%22D+Programming+Language%22&b=501

(it appears that Google now returns a stable number, which seems to be
a recent change)

There is also the question of what gets included in any given search
engine's index, which may favour excluding web pages for all kinds of
arbitrary reasons (spam, "relevance", age, ..).


Counting job market mentions sounds almost completely useless, given
the levels of accuracy on display by your average recruiter who is
publishing the adverts TIOBE are likely crawling ("Oh you know C++?
Excellent! I have this awesome web development opening...").


Additionally the web site claims "[...] the index can be used to check
whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a
strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted
when starting to build a new software system."

This is absolutely *not* the way to go about making a "strategic"
decision about the use of a programming language. :)


David.

On 11/5/07, BCS <BCS at pathlink.com> wrote:
> http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm
>
> http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index/D.html
>