Many people talk about TIOBE and how it's bad, or irrelevant, or broken, or many other vague descriptors of why it should be ignored.

All people talking about TIOBE miss one crucial point: It is software, it has an algorithm, and it is not "bad", it is buggy. That means it can be fixed.

So either fix it, or stop talking about it.





Here's why you can fix it

The TIOBE algorithm is to search for "[language] programming" on a number of search engines, then apply a weight to the resulting count, based on the search engine, and sum the results up to get a score.

They do this because C is a letter, Ruby is a stone, Python is a snake (or a comedy troupe). If they searched only for those words they'd get a lot of trash results. Adding programming means they will mostly get results that contain the phrases "[language] programming" or "[language] programming language". Especially the latter is important, since people talking about the other languages often add "programming language" to disambiguate; while Perl developers have no reason to do so (since the word is mostly unique), and simply don't, thus removing themselves from what TIOBE can find.

Here are the top four search engines and their weights:

Google: 28%

Blogger: 28%

Wikipedia: 13%

YouTube: 7%

What is notable? All of these sites either point to other content, or are directly editable. I'll go on with wikipedia, as that's the easiest example to use. Here are some search terms and their current result counts:

Here's how you can fix it

By comparing the list of results for "perl" and "perl programming" you'll find that many perfectly fine results simply won't show up for the latter and thus won't be visible to TIOBE either.It's not that the talk about Perl isn't there, the problem is that TIOBE can't see it. And that can be changed.

The solution is simple: The string "perl programming language" needs to be added to results that are valid for Perl, but don't currently contain it and as such remain invisible to TIOBE. Once TIOBE can actually see the talk about Perl, it will at least stop being a source of false bad press for Perl.

Go through this list and ask site owners to update their site.

Go through this list and ask blog owners to update their blog or entries.

Go through this list and update the page where appropiate.

Go through this list and ask uploaders to update their video descriptions.

Lastly, don't forget that if you own or create any of the type of contents that appear in any of previous result lists, make sure you mention "perl programming language" as well.



