I’m sure a lot of you (that is if anyone is reading this) are familiar with the TIOBE Programming Index. Basically, it’s an index which claims to gauge the popularity of programming languages according to how many times the term language programming (for Delphi that would be Delphi Programming) appears in various search engines. Some in the Delphi community are very excited to see that Delphi is at #8 snapping at the heels of C#. Take a look at Jim McKeeth’s post on the subject here. Now I’m a big fan of Jim’s blog and podcasts, but I can’t get as excited as he is about this.
First of all, does it seem realistic to you that Delphi is only 0.02% behind C#? I’d love it to be true, but all other evidence points to C# being much more popular than Delphi. Unrightly so in my opinion, but true nevertheless. I’m not saying that the TIOBE index is fixed or anything, but it must be fatally flawed somewhere.
So I thought, what could we use as an index of programming language popularity? Someone mentioned job-listings, which is probably a very good indication, but jobs vary geographically, and usually job-listings are specific to a country or region. So for example, looking at a US job listing site would not give you the true state of a particular language in the world. There has to be something more relevant.
Then I thought, how about StackOverflow.com. For those not familiar with StackOverflow.com, have a look at my last post. If we could count the number of questions for a given language, wouldn’t we get a fair idea of the current popularity of a language? If people are asking questions about a language, it’s because that language is being used. It has to be a better indication of current use than how many times a search engine can find some particular words.
So here it is. I’ve taken the top 20 languages from the TIOBE Index, and extracted the number of questions for that particular language from StackOverflow.com by looking at the corresponding tags for that language. I’ve had to use several tags for some of them. For example for Delphi, I took Delphi, Delphi2009, Delphi7 and Delphi-programming. I may have missed a few tags, but I think I managed to get all the main ones. I also took only the top 20 and not all 50 languages in the list, as it seemed like too much hard work.
| Position | TIOBE Position | Language | Stackoverflow Ratings |
| 1 | 7 | C# | 26.381% |
| 2 | 1 | Java | 15.933% |
| 3 | 3 | C++ | 12.126% |
| 4 | 10 | Javascript | 9.239% |
| 5 | 5 | PHP | 8.560% |
| 6 | 6 | Python | 7.988% |
| 7 | 11 | Ruby | 4.887% |
| 8 | 2 | C | 4.764% |
| 9 | 4 | (Visual) Basic | 4.438% |
| 10 | 9 | Perl | 1.893% |
| 11 | 8 | Delphi | 1.770% |
| 12 | 18 | Actionscript | 1.449% |
| 13 | 13 | PL/SQL | 0.262% |
| 14 | 20 | Lua | 0.166% |
| 15 | 17 | COBOL | 0.064% |
| 16 | 14 | SAS | 0.027% |
| 17 | 15 | ABAP | 0.027% |
| 18 | 16 | Pascal | 0.027% |
| 19 | 12 | D | 0.000% |
| 20 | 19 | Logo | 0.000% |
Why has C# gone from 4% to 26%? Well, StackOverflow.com may just be a magnet for .net developers. Actually, I think it was seeded from a .net questions and answers forum which used to live on the Joel On Software page. I still think C# should be closer to the top than the TIOBE index gives it credit for.
Why is Delphi so strong on the TIOBE index, and not so strong on StackOverflow.com? Perhaps the Delphi community just hasn’t found out about StackOverflow.com yet. Perhaps Delphi is easier to use, and you simply don’t have the same number of questions needing answers. Maybe other Delphi resources, be they web sites or books or whatever, are so good that we don’t need StackOverflow.com as much as say Java developers do. Or it could simply be the fact that there are more C# and Java developers out there than there are Delphi developers.
I think it is a whole lot more complicated than this, but the Stack Overflow Index just seems a whole lot closer to what I would have guessed the list to look like than the TIOBE index does. It could be improved. If we could create some algorithm that takes into accounts answers or perhaps even votes as well as questions, we may get a better picture of the current state of each language.
What do you think?
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