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Old 11th January 2011
thirdm thirdm is offline
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Join Date: May 2009
Posts: 248
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Good for fooling them? Good for you since it happens to promote the language you want your boss to feel comfortable with? This "study" tells only what has the most search engine hits more or less. Even their efforts to avoid false positives seem completely casual. Where in their description of their methods do they do anything to account for the fact that Java, Python, and Lisp are all common words, for instance? Or what if it were the case (I think likely given one of Larry Wall's state of the union addresses) that a Python programmer will say he does Python programming but a Perl programmer may often say he does Perl scripting.

TIOBE borders on fraud with the sort of confidence they project based on results that are almost as frivolous as the bsdstats project. Even the name TIOBE, it sounds like something you'd see in chapter 7 of a textbook on regression analysis. It's all a load of crap if you ask me. They even note a huge artifact in their Java data a few years caused only by a change in Google's indexing.

We all know that the popular scripting languages are Perl, Python, Ruby and PHP (at least on non-windows platforms) and that the popular C based OO languages C++, C#, and Java. TIOBE adds hardly a smidgen of information for us.

Your boss would be better off taking a random sample of resumes he receives and seeing what people list on them.
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