Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by duskwuff 22 days ago
> I couldn't get my head around why this is the case, lol.

Because TIOBE's methodology is terrible, and always has been.

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programminglanguages_defin...

It's literally based on the (estimated) number of search engine hits for e.g. "Python programming" on Google and a handful of site-specific search engines (e.g. Amazon, eBay, Walmart, microsoft.com, etc), with some manually applied tweaks for languages with easily confusable names. Many of the fluctuations in rankings - like the big dip in the ranking for C between 2015 and 2018 - probably have more to do with changes in search engine algorithms than any real change in popularity.

2 comments

https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2026/04/14/language-rankings-1-2...

This is usually considered a better ranking. This has Rust at #20.

Oh, thanks for the info. That's suprisingly a weird index to measure usage popularity...