On 09/12/2011 11:43 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
Accuracy (i.e. figuring the "right" ranking) is probably indeed low, but Tiobe's methods are a reasonable proxy for a language's presence. I see the increase of D's Tiobe rank not as a surprise or some random artifact, but a reflection of the strong progress in the past months.
D is prone to overcounting because it's common name matches lots of unrelated stuff, including things like 3-D programming. The Tiobe folks can't be counted on to come up with an accurate measure to filter it out. The latest spike could be for any number of reasons. You might as well be reading tea leaves.
People were scoffing at Scala at number #50, but in my experience it's just as mainstream than D is, and very likely much more. Want some stats? Martin's book on Amazon is #17,254. Andrei's book is #159,672. There are over a dozen Scala books on the market. Stack overflow shows 5,606 tagged with "scala", and 430 questions tagged with "d".
Lame marketing, Andrei. But hey, it works, right?
