Jared Rypka-Hauer, Lead ColdFusion Developer, Minneapolis, MN

FusionAuthority is running a brief article by Judith about the Tiobe Programming Community Index... apparently some measure of programming language popularity. And I use the world "measure" loosely!

ColdFusion shows up as a far-out #30, behind such luminous languages as D, Pascal, Prolog, dBase, and RPG!

According to language on the statistics page, their entire collection of statistics is based on this Google/Yahoo/MSN search query:


So, we have '+"C++ programming" -tv -channel' being used to query the search engines out there for a reliable result set that's somehow indicative of... well... umm... of... something... meaningful? I did a few searches myself:

• +"ColdFusionMX Programming" -tv -channel
• Yahoo: 0 results
• Google: 0 results
• MSN: 0 results
• +"ColdFusion Programming" -tv -channel
• Yahoo: 38,000 results
• Google: 17,900 results
• MSN: 17,965 results
• +"CFMX Programming" -tv -channel
• Yahoo: 92 results
• Google: 102 results
• MSN: 119 results
• +"CFML Programming" -tv -channel
• Yahoo: 240 results
• Google: 138 results
• MSN: 968 results

So... according to Tiobe's search syntax, they're missing approximately 350 Yahoo hits, 240 Google hits, and 1100 Google hits... which is probably statistically negligible. Until, that is, you run the following query:

• +ColdFusion +software
• Yahoo: 3,860,000 results
• Google: 2,640,000 results
• MSN: 257,954 results

That's a shortage of 6,757,954! Why the difference? Until recently, the words "ColdFusion" and "programming" rarely appeared in such close proximity to one another. Another cumulative 120,000 search results come from searching for '+"ColdFusion Development +software' that aren't included in these result sets. So I fail to see how these statistics show anything that's got a half-ounce of meaning.

Even if this "index" had a legit search routine that would find result counts via syntax that was appropriate to a particular language, I fail to see how the number of search results in Google actually bears any relationship to the current popularity of a language! So C++ has been around forever, and is popular with academic circles that put entire curriculums online... how does the length of a resultset from such a search actually convey anything meaningful about a language's current popularity?

Add to this the rediculous bit on their site about the debate over what really comprises a programming language. For the SQL programmers out there, they've made the concession to include PL/SQL... which leaves me wondering why T-SQL is summarily excluded. T-SQL returns nearly 300,000 hits on Google alone, but because it doesn't appear immediately preceding the word "programming" very often... oh yeah, and it's not a programming language anyway.

I also wonder why VB is included in the came category as M-BASIC and Q-BASIC? Yeah, because they're so... similar. Hah!

C'mon, Tiobe... get your head out from behind your belly button and actually use it for thinking. You're apparently smart people... what is this crap?

Alas... laterz!

Thanks, Jared! That was an extremely well-reasoned argument.

I'd like to see some meaningful statistics put up about how many people are using these languages today. Of course, we'd only be covering the web. Intranet and mobile projects (and Intranet is one of ColdFusion's main uses) wouldn't be included, which would skew the results some.

Judith