Poor methodology, questionable results [LWN.net]

Poor methodology, questionable results

Posted Feb 3, 2008 8:16 UTC (Sun) by Cato (subscriber, #7643)
Parent article: TIOBE declares Python as programming language of 2007

The methodology for this survey is highly suspect - they simply search for Google hits on
languages.  While this is entertaining, the fact that JavaScript, at about 3%, is shown as
only 3 times more popular than the D language makes it clear that this has little correlation
with reality.

It's interesting to compare with the Evans Data survey of July 2007:
http://www.techworld.com/news/index.cfm?NewsID=9357 - they actually surveyed 400 developers to
get this data.  Their analysis indicates that JavaScript has three times the popularity of
PHP, Python and Ruby. Given that client-side script development for the Web is easier and more
prevalent than server-side programming, this seems about right, and correlates with the rise
of AJAX as well.

Personally I rather like Perl, and have done a little Python so I can see why people like it,
but this survey is really quite useless despite the pretty icons.

(Log in to post comments)

Poor methodology, questionable results

Posted Feb 6, 2008 1:07 UTC (Wed) by Max.Hyre (subscriber, #1054) [Link]

And this is unexpected how?

I remind you of the best explanation of polling I've seen, courtesy of /.:

This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.

[Typo]

Posted Feb 6, 2008 1:10 UTC (Wed) by Max.Hyre (subscriber, #1054) [Link]

Aaarghh! That was supposed to be ``online polling''.