D comes in rank 43 in TIOBE !

[Brian Tiffin]

On Thursday, 5 August 2021 at 18:20:14 UTC, Vinod K Chandran 
wrote:
> D's TIOBE rank is 43. Take a look.
> https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

Opinion piece from an old guy...

This particular popularity rating is rather tightly focused.

*Real life work* is rarely discussed on the internet.  Tiobe 
captures an internet number.

Take the COBOL number.  Stackoverflow, github, the internet in 
general.  That is almost all personal computer COBOL.  PC COBOL 
is a pittance of total COBOL programmer time.  Teenie pittance.

People developing code for banks, government, military, 
insurance, medical, (name a business that isn't a web business or 
a science) *do not* talk about it in public forums.  They don't 
post questions about how to best sort income tax totals when 
working for the tax collector.  They do not discuss how to best 
catch bad guys trying to cheat on an insurance claim.  Where most 
of the actual world's money flows, is not discussed in public.  
Things like COBOL manage a lot of that flow.  Not discussed on 
StackOverflow and the projects are **never** on GitHub.  A fair 
amount of Java gets discussed, because Java shows up on public 
wire facing applications more often.  Corporate Java, not so much.

Use Tiobe, redmonks, and popcons of all sorts, to help plan and 
develop a career in web programming or open fields like science, 
or free software compilers and utilities.

Other than that, these stats have very little bearing on the 
world at large.  It only reflects the programming world we see on 
the internet.  That's a big world, surely, but the real world is 
orders of magnitude larger.  *Orders of magnitude*.

There are estimates of 750 million office workers that have 
written macros for Excel.  And what, 20 to 30 million 
professional programmers?  Maybe a million writing free or open 
source software that we all talk about on forums and Q&A sites.  
The Tiobe number reflects that fractional million, not the other 
29, let alone the 750.

Try it; *actually, don't*, go to a bank and ask them what 
operating system they use for core business data. That 
information will be treated as a trade secret.  The clerk will 
likely call security if you pry too hard.  Ask a comptroller how 
much they spent on licensing for Oracle last year, and you will 
likely be treated with great suspicion, possibly as a corporate 
spy.

Bank A is not going to let Bank B know how many lines of COBOL 
they have.  Or C, or D, or MUMPS, or Java, or Pascal, or Perl, or 
...  Well, until they get caught with a huge breach and need a 
scapegoat (and we all know that most public facing code is rock 
solid secure code, right? \[sarc\]).

Having said that:

Do discuss D, open projects on the hub, and ask questions on Q&A 
sites, because that will bump up the internet version of the 
numbers of what humans are using computer languages for.  We only 
get to see the public wire facing software numbers; a small 
fraction of the world spinning total. The Tiobe numbers might as 
well be D numbers. Help lead people to a Bright-er future, 
perhaps Alexandrescu-e a few people.   *Sorry, gentlemen; old 
guy, lame dad jokes are the best kinda jokes*.

Have good, make well.