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by KronisLV 372 days ago
If you wanted accurate statistics for each language, you'd probably have to go closer to the source:

  - How many downloads for the compiler/runtime/toolchains have?
  - How many downloads do the packages on the package manager (if any) have?
  - How many downloads do base containers have? How popular are the SaSS/PaSS offerings geared towards the languages?
But of course, doing that for a bunch of stacks would be quite difficult and time consuming, so people feel confident in just looking at Google Trends or an equivalent (or aggregating similar surface level data from a bunch of providers) and just calling it a day.
3 comments
xigoi 372 days ago
> How many downloads do the packages on the package manager (if any) have?

This will overrepresent languages that rely heavily on external packages, such as JavaScript and Rust, while underrepresenting languages with a large standard library where packages are not needed as much.

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alpaca128 372 days ago
Getting those stats seems practically impossible if you want to include as many languages as possible (I don't know how many TIOBE includes, they don't seem to state that anywhere on their site).

How do you measure the downloads on Github? Do you include only releases or also git clones? How do you compare languages with a package manager vs languages without one? What if the language compiler is hosted on a less popular git platform or maybe a personal website? Do you contact those regularly to give you the precise numbers? How do you know those numbers are reliable? How do you e.g. count the number of Rust toolchain installations without putting telemetry into rustup? Do you count nightly + stable + testing toolchains separately?

So it makes sense TIOBE only uses search results as those are comparable - or at least they seem to be, because search engines change their ranking and filtering methods over time and maybe personalize results.

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nindalf 372 days ago
I think those stats might not be easy to come by. I know you can find download stats for Rust at https://lib.rs/stats but I don’t think it’s easy to find a similar data set for other languages?
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MarcusE1W 372 days ago
And some languages like gcc, Python, Perl are often installed as a default with the OS or other tools.
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