D's TIOBE rank is 43. Take a look.
https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

On Thursday, 5 August 2021 at 18:20:14 UTC, Vinod K Chandran wrote:

It was at rank 23 a year ago:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200811123526/https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

On Thursday, 5 August 2021 at 19:06:31 UTC, jfondren wrote:

Without comment, I guess this is easily read as negative. I just mean that 43 isn't worth celebrating. I don't think 23 was worth celebrating either. In the top 20 are "Classic Visual Basic", "Assembly Language", SQL, PHP. At 43, D has fallen below COBOL, "Ladder Logic", Logo, and Ada. Should I conclude that Logo might be a better language to write my next project in?

Changes in the top 3 or top 5 languages of this index could be exciting to follow, but even by the top 10 it's hard to see a lot of meaning in the placements.

On Thursday, 5 August 2021 at 19:30:32 UTC, jfondren wrote:

But people keep saying that annual compiler downloads are at an all time high... then how?

On Thursday, 5 August 2021 at 20:03:01 UTC, Tejas wrote:

That's just CI builds

On Thursday, 5 August 2021 at 20:05:00 UTC, singingbush wrote:

;_;

Oh well, atleast it is higher than Nim(for now)

On Thursday, 5 August 2021 at 18:20:14 UTC, Vinod K Chandran wrote:

the tiobe index measures the popularity of programming languages based on the number of search engine queries. i find this index to be more close to reality:

https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2021/08/05/language-rankings-6-21/

On Thursday, 5 August 2021 at 20:05:00 UTC, singingbush wrote:

I thought those were excluded from the download graphs

On Thursday, 5 August 2021 at 22:47:03 UTC, pilger wrote:

D's community doesn't use StackOverflow often, which biases that index against D.

Honestly, I think these indices are simple and silly - it's not worth worrying about them.

On Thursday, 5 August 2021 at 18:20:14 UTC, Vinod K Chandran wrote:

Opinion piece from an old guy...

This particular popularity rating is rather tightly focused.

Real life work is rarely discussed on the internet. Tiobe captures an internet number.

Take the COBOL number. Stackoverflow, github, the internet in general. That is almost all personal computer COBOL. PC COBOL is a pittance of total COBOL programmer time. Teenie pittance.

People developing code for banks, government, military, insurance, medical, (name a business that isn't a web business or a science) do not talk about it in public forums. They don't post questions about how to best sort income tax totals when working for the tax collector. They do not discuss how to best catch bad guys trying to cheat on an insurance claim. Where most of the actual world's money flows, is not discussed in public. Things like COBOL manage a lot of that flow. Not discussed on StackOverflow and the projects are never on GitHub. A fair amount of Java gets discussed, because Java shows up on public wire facing applications more often. Corporate Java, not so much.

Use Tiobe, redmonks, and popcons of all sorts, to help plan and develop a career in web programming or open fields like science, or free software compilers and utilities.

Other than that, these stats have very little bearing on the world at large. It only reflects the programming world we see on the internet. That's a big world, surely, but the real world is orders of magnitude larger. Orders of magnitude.

There are estimates of 750 million office workers that have written macros for Excel. And what, 20 to 30 million professional programmers? Maybe a million writing free or open source software that we all talk about on forums and Q&A sites. The Tiobe number reflects that fractional million, not the other 29, let alone the 750.

Try it; actually, don't, go to a bank and ask them what operating system they use for core business data. That information will be treated as a trade secret. The clerk will likely call security if you pry too hard. Ask a comptroller how much they spent on licensing for Oracle last year, and you will likely be treated with great suspicion, possibly as a corporate spy.

Bank A is not going to let Bank B know how many lines of COBOL they have. Or C, or D, or MUMPS, or Java, or Pascal, or Perl, or ... Well, until they get caught with a huge breach and need a scapegoat (and we all know that most public facing code is rock solid secure code, right? [sarc]).

Having said that:

Do discuss D, open projects on the hub, and ask questions on Q&A sites, because that will bump up the internet version of the numbers of what humans are using computer languages for. We only get to see the public wire facing software numbers; a small fraction of the world spinning total. The Tiobe numbers might as well be D numbers. Help lead people to a Bright-er future, perhaps Alexandrescu-e a few people. Sorry, gentlemen; old guy, lame dad jokes are the best kinda jokes.

Have good, make well.