[arciini]

I was pretty convinced by this article to not use TIOBE as a mark of a language's popularity: https://nindalf.com/posts/stop-citing-tiobe/

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.

[duskwuff]

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.