On Wednesday, September 14, 2011 16:48 Jeff Nowakowski wrote: > On 09/14/2011 05:41 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote: > > One issue here is that the relative rank of Scala and D on Tiobe has > > become a straw man. Let's not forget how it started: I posted Tiobe's > > September newsletter to reddit and you considered it lame marketing. > > Well I disagree. > > It's not a straw man. The only reason the D was even mentioned on Tiobe > was because it hit #20. If it was languishing beneath #50 with Scala, > which by any measure that aren't bullshit Tiobe statistics it should be, > then you would have nothing to post. > > The Tiobe thing irked me, but I wasn't even going to say anything until > I saw snide comment about Scala at #50 in the reddit thread and Caligo > posting here about all the "haters" who downvoted this "news". It's > misinformation, not news.
Tiobe attempts to measure the popularity of a language. It's an indicator of language popularity which is, on some level, paid attention to. So, the fact that D has moved up in the rankings is news. And as supporters of D, we consider it to be good news. So, reporting it makes sense. Now, while Tiobe may be an indicator of a language's popularity, and it may be paid attention to, it could very well be that it has issues and is ultimately a bad indicator of language popularity. Measuring something like language popularity is difficult to do accurately. So, the fact that Scala is above or below D in the rankings may or may not ultimately really have anything to do with their actual relative popularity (personally, I would have thought that Scala was more popular). That isn't really relevant though. The fact that D moved up in Tiobe's rankings _is_ news. If it were reported as proof that D is more popular than the languages below it on Tiobe's list, _that_ would be misinformation. But all that was reported was that D had gone up in Tiobe's rankings. That is completely true and isn't misinformation at all. And as some people pay attention to Tiobe (for better or worse), the fact that D is higher in Tiobe's rankings matters to some folks and does have an impact. The issue of whether Tiobe is actually measuring what it's trying to measure is a separate matter entirely. And if someone on reddit happens to have taken it as proof that D is more popular than Scala and said something snide about Scala, that's their problem. There's no reason to take it out on Andrei for reporting that D moved up in Tiobe's rankings, which is completely factual. - Jonathan M Davis
