Its primary point is that TIOBE is based on *number* of search results on a weighted list of search engines, not actual usage in Github, search volume, job listings, or any of the other number of signals you'd expect a popularity index to use.
It could easily be indicating that Python articles are being generated by LLMs more than any other class of articles.
It's even worse than "Stop Citing TIOBE" makes it sound. The TIOBE rank is based on the number of hits reported from "25 search engines", which amount to:
1) Google, on nine different TLDs
2) Amazon, on seven TLDs
3) EBay, on two TLDs
4) wikipedia.org (which ends up defaulting to the English Wikipedia)
5) microsoft.com (which only searches Microsoft documentation)
6) sharepoint.com (similarly, Microsoft 365 documentation)
7) rakuten.co.jp
8) walmart.com
Only one of these is actually a web search engine; there are actually more shopping web sites included than search engines. Bing, and its various mirrors, were apparently all excluded because they don't display the number of hits on the result page.
And yes, this only adds up to 23. The TIOBE web site doesn't explain the discrepancy.
I'm sorry, I simply refuse to take seriously an outlet that publishes the following:
"""
Remarkably, SQL has started dropping slowly recently. This month it is at position #12, which is its lowest position in the TIOBE index ever. SQL will remain the backbone and lingua franca of databases for decades to come. However, in the booming field of AI, where data is usually unstructured, NoSQL databases are often a better fit. NoSQL (which uses data interchange formats such as JSON and XML) has become a serious threat for the well-defined but rather static SQL approach. NoSQL's popularity is comparable to the rise of dynamically typed languages such as Python if compared to well-defined statically typed programming languages such as C++ and Java.
"""
This is actually a great site; it feels much more representative of what I actually see in job ads and the real world than some other rankings. If all I did was browse HN all day I'd think Rust is the only language people use for new projects
Its primary point is that TIOBE is based on *number* of search results on a weighted list of search engines, not actual usage in Github, search volume, job listings, or any of the other number of signals you'd expect a popularity index to use.
It could easily be indicating that Python articles are being generated by LLMs more than any other class of articles.