back

by shagie·9y ago·view on hn ↗
As noted in http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ the changes in google's indexing algorithms caused massive swings in their index. If you search google for "Java programming" and "C programming" you'll note approximately the same ratio of the "Java ratings" to "C ratings".

The results of the toibe index are heavily influenced by google's search.

People working on Dart working at google would likely be familiar with how to create a page that has improved google visibility compared to say... the R or objective C communities. This isn't a "ohh, nefarious!" type thing but rather a "how to make a web page that conforms to everything that google search would want" is part of the way one would think.

It is possible to game tiobe given that its strongly influenced by google's search results. If you go glance at delphi's history in 2008, you'll see gamification of it - http://web.archive.org/web/20120312021442/http://delphi.org/... http://web.archive.org/web/20120312021416/http://delphi.org/... http://web.archive.org/web/20120312021435/http://delphi.org/... - and then you go look at the graph for delphi, and you'll see http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/delphi-object-pascal/ .

Simply having well crafted pages that get indexed well for Dart would be sufficient to bump a language on Tiobe. And that's why its all a load of marketing.

2 comments
Hi, I'm on the Dart team.

The people who work on dartlang.org do try to make it search friendly, of course, but I don't think anyone on the team takes TIOBE very seriously.

According to their chart, C lost half of its popularity in 2016, and Delphi is more popular than Go and Objective-C.

I could be wrong, but I think the spike in Dart's popularity recently is mostly because there was a world championship in "dart" (the pub game) recently.

The primary goal of the TIOBE index is not to accurately measure language popularity, it's to increase the popularity of tiobe.com. And, at that, they're doing a great job.

>The results of the toibe index are heavily influenced by google's search.

From TIOBE:

The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. It is important to note that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.