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by emadb 896 days ago
The TIOBE Index [1] ranks Fortran at 12th place! Consider that Ruby is at 18th. In my opinion, this says a lot about the value of the index.

[1] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

4 comments

TIOBE index is sometimes very strange, but it takes into account available jobs as well. That said, their methodology has been challenged forever.

Still interesting to see that languages like Fortran (12th) and Pascal (13th) are ranked higher than the most popular languages for mobile app development (Swift for iOS, ranked 16th, and Kotlin for Android, ranked 17th) or a highly praised and adopted language for new projects like Rust (only 19th!).

Pretty sure that Kotlin is not the most popular language for Android development. That would still be Java.
Sorry to be negative on the web, but the TIOBE index has no value whatsoever and is complete gibberish. Nobody should be paying attention to it.

https://youtube.com/shorts/m76vWNr83wo

I don't care one way or another about the TIOBE index, but that video is obnoxious and isn't making an argument or presenting data. Not sure why anyone would be convinced by this.
I just linked a short because I figured it fit into the attention span of a typical internet user.

If you want something more reasoned there's this: https://blog.nindalf.com/posts/stop-citing-tiobe/

So what would be the property reference for "average language popularity"?
Even if TIOBE wasn't garbage (and let's be clear: TIOBE is and always has been garbage for a litany of reasons), no such reference would exist, because the question is ill-specified.

Are you a non-technical manager? Then hire people who know the language your company has always used, or otherwise whatever languages your hiring pool is familiar with.

Are you a technical manager? Then you evaluate languages based on the intersection of hiring availability and technical merits.

Are you a student? Then use whatever language looks most interesting.

Are you an educator? Then use whatever language best expresses the concepts of the specific curriculum.

Are you an open source contributor? Then select a language to work in based on technical merits, personal taste, and community interaction.

"Popularity" is not one thing, it's dozens of things which all vary based on context.

TIOBE is as reliable as Gartner.
One day, dlang might even overtake cobol in the TIOBE index...