On Tuesday, 10 December 2019 at 10:04:17 UTC, Martin Tschierschke wrote:
> https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/d/
>
> Any comment on this curve?
> Is it possible to match certain events to this shape?

Yes, changes to Google's filtering mechanism and possibly that they added new languages.
TIOBE only count the number of pages search engines return at any given time. It is not like people suddenly delete all their web pages...

A quick drop reflect something mechanical, it is not measuring what people do.

Google changes frequently (many times a year). Like you can suddenly loose over 50% of your indexed pages because Google start to classify them as covering the same content. Or they change their static quality scoring of pages. And this propagates very slowly throughout their system as it takes time for them to crawl the entire web.

A language like Java that is frequently mentioned as the "java programming language" by mainstream news agencies throughout the world will get more pages with high static quality score spread on many sites, so more likely to be shown and thus generates more hits.

Google is not evaluated on the number of page it returns for a query term, but on the relevance of the first few pages of query results.  E.g.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discounted_cumulative_gain

On Tuesday, 10 December 2019 at 10:04:17 UTC, Martin Tschierschke wrote:
> Any comment on this curve?
> Is it possible to match certain events to this shape?

More interesting curve to discuss:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=dlang

Basically no change over the past 5-6 years for active people searching for "dlang".

On Tuesday, 10 December 2019 at 13:27:04 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> On Tuesday, 10 December 2019 at 10:04:17 UTC, Martin Tschierschke wrote:
>> Any comment on this curve?
>> Is it possible to match certain events to this shape?
>
> More interesting curve to discuss:
>
> https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=dlang
>
> Basically no change over the past 5-6 years for active people searching for "dlang".

I never understood why people here seem to think that D is more popular? If D is more popular, you will see it reflected in a very key core component. All you need to do is look up code.dlang.org its growth and you see that D has the same growth as before. You can even track it on websites like www.modulecounts.com where its growth is the same slow 1 package / day, over the 3 years.

No spikes, no sudden growth change ... You expect with a increase in downloads ( d statistic ), blogs, increased marketing that a increased interests results in a growth spike ( like other languages ). But it does not. What does it tell you? People try D, they discus D but a lot simply do not progress beyond trying D.

D is not some magically language where all users do not contribute or make missing modules.

Just compare the package growth of Rust or Julia or ... That is what a surge in popularity will look like.

Maybe compared to 10 years ago D is more popular, but when your looking at a ultra low bar, its easy to feel that your doing good. Tiobe has been fairly unreliable for years by checking google results. The more non-unique a programming language there name, the more the results are unpredictable. Last year Crystal was at 38 because ... crystal + programming = not the programming language. Yikes!

Even Swift / Objective-C results are nonsense because they are the same market. Yet now both results 75% are bigger, then the actual original Objective-C market share. Past legacy results keep Object-C at a higher position resulting a wrong impression.

A better metric has always been: Jobs posting, Github/Gitlab, module/package gains etc. Show me the D jobs? In Europe there are none. Modules growth is the same as it was 3 years ago ( turtle speed ).

In essence while D has been on a charm offense, if one looks at the data. Its clear that D may have people trying out D ( increased in downloads of D ) but this is not reflected in actual contributors to D. Even if new D users are very selfish to not contribute, they can not be all 100% selfish. Even a 10% gain, with a increased in users, will reflect back in projects, modules, contributions etc. Yet, its not.

So the essence is that D has a issue keeping those new users interested beyond trying it out. This is something that i feel is ignored in a lot of these conversations.

On Thursday, 12 December 2019 at 02:26:57 UTC, Jeff wrote:
> growth as before. You can even track it on websites like www.modulecounts.com where its growth is the same slow 1 package / day, over the 3 years.

Interesting site. The only languages with sustained exponential growth seems to be Python, C# and maybe Rust. Others have exponential growth at the beginning, but then turn linear.

Nim has same growth rate as D then, but D seems to have a slight decline in 2019.

On Thursday, 12 December 2019 at 02:26:57 UTC, Jeff wrote:
>
> A better metric has always been: Jobs posting, Github/Gitlab, module/package gains etc. Show me the D jobs? In Europe there are none.

I'm hiring at least 25 more people and all of those jobs could be to work in D at least some of the time and the majority all of the time.

I haven't advertised for most of the people I have hired to work in D because I haven't had time - it's a lower return on invested time approach - and so far I haven't needed to.

Is Britain in Europe.  I think so.  And I do have people working remotely from mainland Europe.

If one were advertising to hire people then probably you would advertise for C++ guys.  What would be the point in saying you need to know D in an advert targeting a broad audience?  I haven't used headhunters much but when I have they say an investment company is looking for people who know C++.

On Monday, 4 November 2019 at 09:03:04 UTC, RazvanN wrote:
> Good news, everyone!
>
> D has entered the Tiobe top 20 ranking of programming languages [1], landing on the 18th position. I have been keeping an eye on this index, and it is for the first time that I see this happening.
>
> Cheers,
> RazvanN
>
> [1] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

I just rechecked just for fun: D climbed to 17th place in that index this month. The more I see D climb rapidly in that index, the less I trust those results. :D

Does a high listing in that index bring any kind of measurable effects with it?

On Monday, 4 November 2019 at 09:03:04 UTC, RazvanN wrote:
> Good news, everyone!
>
> D has entered the Tiobe top 20 ranking of programming languages [1], landing on the 18th position. I have been keeping an eye on this index, and it is for the first time that I see this happening.
>
> Cheers,
> RazvanN
>
> [1] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

In top 20 there is also Delphi/Object Pascal, Assembly and Visual Basic .NET :) I believe their positions barely reflect the popularity of these languages.

Funny that D TIOBE popularity growth kind of coincided with me finishing reading "Programming in D" by Ali and starting spending a lot of time online and heavily using search engines, on a daily basis. Just saying :D

It is still nice, index is index and any publicity is good for the language.

On 1/7/20 10:50 AM, p.shkadzko wrote:> On Monday, 4 November 2019 at 09:03:04 UTC, RazvanN wrote:

> "Programming in D" by Ali

> index is index and any publicity is good

Completely misunderstanding this thread, "Ali" "promotes" the following "index", which he finds to be very helpful:

  http://ddili.org/ders/d.en/ix.html

Ali

On Tuesday, 7 January 2020 at 19:21:43 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
> On 1/7/20 10:50 AM, p.shkadzko wrote:> On Monday, 4 November 2019 at 09:03:04 UTC, RazvanN wrote:
>
> > "Programming in D" by Ali
>
> > index is index and any publicity is good
>
> Completely misunderstanding this thread, "Ali" "promotes" the following "index", which he finds to be very helpful:
>
>   http://ddili.org/ders/d.en/ix.html
>
> Ali

Hmm, for some reason in Firefox clicking on any link in this index takes forever to load the indexed section. I prefer http://ddili.org/ders/d.en/index.html and manual lookup ;)

On 1/7/20 11:55 AM, p.shkadzko wrote:
> On Tuesday, 7 January 2020 at 19:21:43 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:

>>   http://ddili.org/ders/d.en/ix.html

> Hmm, for some reason in Firefox clicking on any link in this index takes forever to load the indexed section

Thanks for letting me know. However, they should all be simple links with anchors. I hope others can debug and perhaps I can do something on the server side.

Ali