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Does the TIOBE rating of programming language play a prominent role in the selection of programming language in enterprise computing?

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4 Answers

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No. TIOBE is not used.

The prominent role is politics.

What do influential people know. What are they comfortable with. Not much else really matters.

When it comes to programming languages, all the "major" languages are perfectly fine. They all work well. They've all got serious, large bases of committed users. Any of the languages in the top 20 (or more) on the TIOBE list are all equally usable.

In 30 years, I've never seen a decision like programming language choice made except by default. The person who's most influential makes the final decision.

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+1 It's all politics when it comes to big businesses – Gary Rowe Mar 16 '11 at 13:39
I'm in a large corporation. I use TIOBE as an argument to make my point in political discussions - while I consider TIOBE quite useless, seeing the fluctuation happening in there and the methodology is a bit weird, ranking the language where people have the most issues (= being talked about most) on top etc ;-) – johannes Apr 17 '12 at 20:32
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TIOBE is an index of how much "gossip" there is about a language. If you or someplace you work bases technical choices on gossip then .......

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You're screwed. – Mahmoud Hossam Apr 17 '12 at 13:32
:-} -- just saw the "your screwed" message in my in box -- was about to don may flame wars armor before I realized the context. :-} – James Anderson Apr 18 '12 at 1:37
I knew someone would misunderstand. :D – Mahmoud Hossam Apr 18 '12 at 2:05
up vote 1 down vote

You're mixing up cause and effect. TIOBE lists languages that are most popular in the industry, not other way around.

I agree with S.Lott, it's mostly politics and decisions made on management level. Although TIOBE can be used to counter arguments like "no one is using Python" (not that it'll help -- if CTO only knows Java, you'll be programming Java).

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+1: "if CTO only knows Java..." I watched a power swing at a client site -- from Java to VB.NET -- based entirely on hiring a second director of development who was more influential than their "peer". Essentially, the new paradigm was to use Visual Studio plugins that generated VB code instead of all that WSDL/SOAP/Web Services foolishness. No discussion. No TIOBE. No review. Just quiet changes to projects, changes to schedules, changes to priorities, changes to budgets. – S.Lott Mar 16 '11 at 15:32
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TIOBE lists languages that are easy to find. The two are not the same at all. – DeadMG Apr 10 '12 at 10:32
@DeadMG: what do you mean? – vartec Apr 10 '12 at 10:37
@vartec: I mean that if you look at TIOBE's method, it's so hilariously pathetic, I struggle to believe that it has any relation to popularity whatsoever. – DeadMG Apr 10 '12 at 18:51
@DeadMG: how do you define "popularity" then, if having visible community isn't popularity. – vartec Apr 10 '12 at 19:27
up vote 1 down vote

TIOBE is not a meaningful indicator of anything. Most specifically the claim that "TIOBE lists languages that are most popular in the industry" is not a conclusion that can be drawn.

All that TIOBE tells you is which programming languages have the most documents on the web written about them. It is a huge leap of logic to conclude that that is an indicator of how much the languages are used in the real world.

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