TIOBE Is (Unintentionally) Misleading; in Truth, Interest in Java Is Surging

https://weblogs.java.net/blog/editor/archive/2014/04/23/tiobe-unintentionally-misleading-truth-interest-java-surging

by ExpiredLink • 12 years ago

32 21 12 years ago

weblogs.java.net

Mithaldu3• 12 years ago

What do you mean unintentionally? TIOBE have always been bald-faced liars who know their methodology is broken, their data useless and who only publish clickbait to get ad impressions.

Mithaldu3• 12 years ago

So, i've gotten multiple downvotes. Why? Do you wish a detailed explanation of exactly how broken their approach is? Please ask questions. What i stated is merely simple fact and if it is doubted, i will happily expand.

Terretta• 12 years ago

When making an inflammatory statement, perhaps you should have expanded in the first place.

Then when you perceived the down votes, perhaps you should have gone ahead with that detailed explanation instead of doubling down with a contentless comment.

27182818284• 12 years ago

I thought you might be new to Hacker News, but it looks like you've been a member for several years. You actually have a higher comment average than I do, so I'm surprised that you're surprised why your comment received down votes. (There wasn't any content in it, and it was not as civil as it easily could have been. )

seacious• 12 years ago

There's a lot to dislike about java, but the platform independence story of the JVM really is the best of anything out there that I've experienced. That doesn't necessarily mean Java anymore, Clojure, Scala, etc. all benefit from the work done to make the JVM truly platform independent. But when I compare it to my experiences with Node.js, ruby, or haskell, (dependencies not working because library maintainers forgetting (or don't care) that not every one uses their preferred development operating system), I am really grateful for all the boring, finicky work that contributors have put into making a truly cross platform development target.

jf5s2• 12 years ago

The JVM is a great platform, even if I prefer not to use Java the language much. Most of the code I write these days is in Scala.

dsl• 12 years ago

the platform independence story of the JVM really is the best of anything out there

Serious question: Is this still true, and does it even matter anymore?

If you are building web apps you can run whatever platform you want. 40%+ of smart phones don't do Java. Arduino doesn't have a fully functional JVM. Java in the browser is non-existent due to security issues.

toddan• 12 years ago

I think it matters, try developing ruby on rails on windows and you will have bad time. For me only php and java are the two platforms that i have been able to develop with, no matter what os i am currently using.

joblessjunkie• 12 years ago

Ohloh shows Java holding steady for the last several years at about 10% of all commit activity in the open source world.

http://www.ohloh.net/languages/java

kiallmacinnes• 12 years ago

Surely the same logic can be applied to the other languages?

Yes... the absolute number of Google searches for "Java Programming" is growing.. but the relative number of "Java Programming" to "* Programming" is shrinking.

Measurements of this kind without anything to compare against are just misleading IMO.

rbanffy• 12 years ago

Something is off. http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=java%20programming&cm... shows Ethiopia, Uganda and Philippines more interested in Java programming than India.

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=java%20programming%20... OTOH, shows India behind only of Philippines.

tim_m_locke• 12 years ago

I think there are a number of better ways to determine which programming languages are popular than what Tiobe uses. If they were only counting pages generated within a specific timeframe, perhaps a month or year, then their results might have some validity. Every month they are including all of the web pages that exist. I believe this skews their results.

I'm also not convinced that language popularity is an important metric. I think knowing which languages are strongly sought after by employers is more important and relevant. I think it is also important to know which languages are suitable for particular tasks, for people looking to create new code bases.

It would also be interesting to know how much code exists in various languages, and how many people are currently employed maintaining code bases in various languages.

thinkersilver• 12 years ago

Agree that job market demand is better a metric to gauge a languages longevity. Which language skills are employers throwing their money at?

Added a few links below for programming language job trends for Java and couple others. The source is itjobswatch.co.uk . Haven't got an equivalent for US yet but Java is doing just fine

Job Demand and Salary Trends:

Java [http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/java.do#demand_trend]

C# Sharp [http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/csharp.do#demand_trend

python http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/python.do#demand_trend]

jfaucett• 12 years ago

This article might have some truthyness but the arguments would never lead me to that conclusion.

1. "wouldnt it be reasonable for searches for a mature language to decrease since devs are already very familiar with that language" - No, only if the language is also dead. Any actively developed language is going to always be expanding its libraries, frameworks, feature set, etc. and as a developer you constantly have to keep up.

2. Also saying total "java programming" searches quadrupled sounds good, but all other searches had a 5 times increase using his own data.

3. When I use his same method for "python programming" (http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=python%20programming&...), I get an increase to 86 (2013) from 54 (January 2007) for python. This would mean compared to java, python has had an 8 times increase!

4. Basically unless you know exactly how google is normalizing the data, you are not going to have anything worth reporting on using actual numbers anyway.

sanderjd• 12 years ago

While you're right that people pretty much always have to keep up and refresh their memories, the keeping up searches look very different than the learning ones do. Developers already well-versed in a language are more likely to search for specific APIs or go directly to documentation they have already bookmarked.

chazu• 12 years ago

The author supports his thesis by taking statistics which are adjusted for overall volume of google traffic, then de-adjusting them. That right there invalidates the results.

bencoder• 12 years ago

I think one could argue that earlier users of google were more likely to be programmers and that the overall proportion of "* programming" related searches has declined, and therefore the normalisation isn't accurate.

In fact this can be somewhat confirmed by checking google trends for "programming" [1]

For a more accurate evaluation, the relative measure should be compared against all "* programming" searches. And if you overlay "programming" and "java programming" charts, you can see that java programming curve has declined less than the programming curve. [2]

[1] http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=programming

[2] http://i.imgur.com/KbIm0w2.png (Java - red, Programming - blue)

donutello• 12 years ago

https://www.facebook.com/notes/mike-develin/debunking-prince...

vorg• 12 years ago

A flaw that makes the Tiobe index easy to game is it uses the maximum results from querying several search engines to calculate the ranking, not the sum.

That's how in Oct 2013 Groovy rose to #18 in the index from outside the top 50 only 5 months earlier (May 2013). 3 months later (Jan 2014), Groovy had dropped back out of the top 50 (#32 in Nov, #46 in Dec). According to Tiobe's Janssen [1]: "It turned out that the data that is produced by one of the Chinese sites that we track is interpreted incorrectly by our algorithms. After we had fixed this bug, Groovy lost much of its ratings."

Someone is also using a Chinese proxy to exploit Maven, boosting the apparent download figures for Groovy to target rankings like Redmonk [2]. Click on "country" and see where 85% of those downloads come from.

[1] http://www.infoworld.com/t/application-development/c-pulls-a...

[2] https://bintray.com/groovy/maven/groovy/view/statistics

TIOBE Is (Unintentionally) Misleading; in Truth, Interest in Java Is Surging

Related Stories