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TIOBE index

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The TIOBE index graph from 2002 to 2015, showing Java (blue) being overtaken by C (black) over the course of a decade.[1]

TIOBE programming community index is a measure of popularity of programming languages, created and maintained by the TIOBE Company based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.[2] TIOBE stands for "The Importance Of Being Earnest" which is taken from the name of a comedy play written by Oscar Wilde at the end of the nineteenth century.[3] The index is calculated from the number of search engine results for queries containing the name of the language.[4] The index covers searches in Google, Google Blogs, MSN, Yahoo!, Baidu, Wikipedia and YouTube. The index is updated once a month. The current information is free but the long term statistics over many years of observation is for sale. The index authors think that it may be valuable when accepting various strategic decisions. TIOBE focuses on Turing complete languages, so it does not provide information about the popularity of, for instance, SQL or HTML.

According to the site, TIOBE index is "not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written".[5] However the site does claim that the number of web pages may reflect the number of skilled engineers, courses and jobs worldwide.

Criticism

Pierre Carbonnelle challenges TIOBE's naming of Objective-C as the "programming language of the year" in 2012, arguing that there may be many Objective-C pages on the web, but they are rarely read. It proposes its own PYPL index instead, based on Google Trends data.[6] It shows popularity trends since 2004, worldwide and for 5 different countries.

Tim Bunce, author of the Perl DBI, has been critical of the index and its methods of ranking.[7]

TIOBE index is sensitive to the ranking policy of the search engines on which it is based. For instance, in April 2004 Google performed a cleanup action to get rid of unfair attempts to promote the search rank. As a consequence, there was a large drop for languages such as Java and C++, yet these languages have stayed at the top of the table. To avoid such fluctuations, TIOBE now uses multiple search engines.

See also

References

  1. ^ McMillan, Robert (2013-08-01). "Is Java Losing Its Mojo?". wired.com. Java is on the wane, at least according to one outfit that keeps on eye on the ever-changing world of computer programming languages. For more than a decade, it has dominated the Tiobe Programming Community Index — a snapshot of software developer enthusiasm that looks at things like internet search results to measure how much buzz different languages have. But lately, Java has been slipping.
  2. ^ TIOBE. "TIOBE Software: The Coding Standards Company". Retrieved 15 July 2015.
  3. ^ TIOBE. "TIOBE Software: The Coding Standards Company". Retrieved 15 July 2015.
  4. ^ "TIOBE Programming Community Index Definition".
  5. ^ TIOBE. "TIOBE Software: The Coding Standards Company". Retrieved 15 July 2015.
  6. ^ "PYPL PopularitY of Programming Language". Retrieved 15 July 2015.
  7. ^ Bunce, Tim (2009-05-17). "TIOBE Index is being gamed". TimBunce.org. Retrieved 2011-08-08.
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