Re: TIOBE index

[jonathan <johnscpg@googlemail.com>]

On Mar 8, 11:53 am, Gautier write-only <gautier_niou...@hotmail.com>
wrote:
> Hello,
>
> From time to time I'm looking at the TIOBE Programming Community Index
>  http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
> The results, for long, are not very glorious for Ada, but I told
> myself if was like it was.
> For instance the latest ranking for Pascal, Fortran and Ada are:
>
>   Tiobe ranking
>   --------------
>   Pascal  0.603%
>   Fortran 0.563%
>   Ada     0.376%
>
> Now, I spent a few minutes to look at the figures myself, following
> the famous citation "The only statistics you can trust are those you
> falsified yourself".
> So I made the search engine queries as described there:
>  http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/tpci_definition...
> including 1-year time windowing when available.
> Here are the results (the simple queries without time windowing give
> similar results):
>
>         Google     Google Blogs  MSN        Yahoo!      Wikipedia
> YouTube
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> Pascal  2'020'000  25'027        3'170'000  25'200'000  1'664      232
> Fortran 1'510'000  11'768        1'640'000  7'900'000   949        113
> Ada     2'140'000  110'310       2'670'000  49'300'000  1'764      70
>
> With the weights being 23% for each engine, except YouTube with 7%, it
> is obviously impossible to have Ada's ranking that is lower than
> Fortran's and even than Pascal's.
> Funny thing: the weights sum up to more than 100%, so don't forget to
> divide by the sum of weights!
> If you take for instance Pascal's ranking as a reference, the rankings
> would be actually the following:
>   Pascal  0.603%
>   Fortran 0.294%
>   Ada     0.668% <- uh-oh, almost the "A" category...
>

Thanks Gautier ... I hadn't realized how silly
the TIOBE index is until you explained how it works.
Another data point:

http://www.blackducksoftware.com/oss/projects#languageos

Still can't draw any real conclusions about the software
industry from this data point, but it least it is not
meaningless.

Jonathan