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To: Olumide Samson <oludonsexy@gmail.com>
Cc: Mike Schinkel <mikeschinkel@gmail.com>, PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP's declining(?) popularity
From: zeev@php.net (Zeev Suraski)

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On Sun, Sep 15, 2019 at 1:15 PM Olumide Samson <oludonsexy@gmail.com> wrote=
:

> I also don't agree with the index and all its statistics
>

I'm not sure what you mean by 'all its statistics'.  Mostly everything on
the methodology page is fluff, which may be purposely there to hide the
only part that really matters:
----------------

The ratings are calculated by counting hits of the most popular search
engines. The search query that is used is

+"<language> programming"

 ---------------

It's a simplistic measure of an arbitrary search term in search engines -
nothing more.  It's completely, 100.0% meaningless.


> , yet I'm not invalidating it as it is a much-viewed index globally.
>

I am.  It's quite remarkable that people are paying any level of attention
to it whatsoever, and indeed it's saddening.  But the fact that many people
believe something doesn't make it true, if the evidence clearly suggest it
isn't.

According to the index :
>  "Till the end of 2009 everything went fine, but soon after that PHP was
> going downhill from 10% to 5% market share in 2 years=E2=80=99 time. In 2=
014 it
> halved again to 2.5%.
>

Trying to correlate the TIOBE index with anything that happened in the PHP
world is akin to trying to correlate the results of rand() with the weather
forecast.  The two aren't related at all.  Building any thesis on the
foundation of the TIOBE index is like trying to build a brick house on a
muddy soil.  Heck, like trying to build a brick house in the middle of the
ocean.  There's nothing to build on.

While it's extremely difficult to measure the popularity of languages,
RedMonk's slightly more relevant measurements (GitHub projects and Stack
Overflow questions) suggest it's been doing well over the last decade -
right up there in the top 5 with no meaningful decline.  What Mike and
others pointed out are areas where we should consider investing if we want
to *increase* the popularity beyond what it already is (which is what
happened with Python).

Zeev

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