May 19, 2021
Javascript and CoBol on Tiobe
For those not familiar with the Tiobe Index this may seem mystical but it’s really pretty mundane. Tiobe is a website that presents the current most “popular” programming languages out there and ranks them and also compares that ranking to the previous month. Here’s a snapshot from today (5/19/21)…like 2 minutes ago.
Obviously, in a given month there won’t be a lot of movement but there is some, for example, on these first 15 languages we see that Java and Python have swapped places along with some other changes that might be more interesting to other people.
The way they calculate these rankings is somewhat arbitrary, albeit consistent, and is explained at the top of the page that I linked above.
I was first introduced to the index by a boss who was friggin’ annoying, one of the annoying things he did was come in Monday morning after a weekend of technical reading (*cough*get a life*cough*) and immediately call a meeting of all the engineers and see what knowledge we had of his newly found learning and another annoying thing he did was to quote things like the Tiobe Index.
This made me check it now and then so I could perform well at Monday morning trivia but when I left that boss I saw no reason to continue checking it. I stumbled across an article today where it was mentioned and i thought, “let me give it another look”.
The first thing I looked for was CoBOL. That’s the first language I learned and I’ve been hearing of it’s demise since 1989. My brother retired from being CoBOL Programmer for his entire career last year, BTW.
There it is! #29! I don’t know what ABAP is and I’m sad and somewhat surprised to see Dart so low on the list. #30 is Julia, which I am not familiar with.
But Wait! There’s more! When you click on one of the languages in the top 20 you get the highest and lowest position it has appeared in the index since 2001 or whenever it appeared I guess. I clicked on Javascript and it honestly has barely budged in 20 years…What the heck does that mean? We can give it a positive spin and admire the rock hard stability and popularity of Javascript or we can (probably) be more realistic and admit it works but it’s not sexy and developers want to do something else.
Anyway, I don't know if these ratings and their movement are significant or if any insights can be gleaned from aforementioned data but I do know it occupied a good half hour of my time on a slow day and I can review the index without the bad feeling that used to accompany that activity.
I hope it distracts you too.
