D has 22 place at the Tiobe index

[Maxim Fomin]

On Wednesday, 25 December 2013 at 09:32:39 UTC, ilya-stromberg 
wrote:
> http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
>
> It will be great if D returns back to the top 20.
>

Whether it measures popularity in a right way is a debatable 
issue, but I want to note, that in recent month (approximatly 
from september 2013) the way popularity is calculated was changed 
several times (by including/excluding search engines and 
adjusting for search lookups), so some language shows unexpected 
shifts in their positions. This destroys the usefulness of 
looking at the dynamics, let alone questioning validity in a 
first place.

Still, if one is interested in long history:

2012.04 0,328%
2012.05 0,327%
2012.06 0,339%
2012.07 0,336%
2012.08 0,332%
2012.09 0,311% <= in top
2012.10 0,284%
2012.11 0,283%
2012.12 0,281%
2013.01 0,296%
2013.02 0,297%
2013.03 0,345%
2013.04 0,314%
2013.05 0,301%
2013.06 0,474%
2013.07 0,364%
2013.08 0,567% <= 1 change in calculations
2013.09 0,331% <= 2 change in calculations
2013.10 0,337%
2013.11 0,392%
2013.12 0,552% <= 3 change in calculations

 From this it can be said that D was moving downwards since Fall 
2012 to summer 2013 and now tiobe cheats index and it is not 
clear whether it will push D up or down. Judging by changes in 
methodology the increase is likely to be preserved and you can 
speculate further that this month value underestimates growth.

Apart from TIOBE there is other index (actually many):
- http://lang-index.sourceforge.net/ Here D is down from ~13 to 
21 place. It is also down in its own category (general purpose). 
I don't have long history here.

What is not taken into account when interpreting indexes is 
reflexivity: if lang is down, so nobody interested in, so lang is 
going even deeper down (and vice versa). I would suggest to look 
at usage indexes rather than at popularity ones.

> D community, thank you for your great work!

I would say it mostly due to limited number of people working in 
dmd/druntime/phobos (names can be obtained from git log) rather 
than to community which generates talks in newsgroups and 
unimplemented DIPs.