> The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages.

This is ranking of popularity only, not any measure of quality. Obviously PHP and SQL are more popular than Rust.

And higher quality. They have official specs, so there can be multiple suppliers. Competition leads to quality.

Without getting too philosophical, I would say the best quality language is the one you can most confidently write in that can solve your problem.

PHP has a spec?

The official one is here: https://github.com/php/php-langspec

It was pushed quite strongly around the time when HHVM was striving for high compatibility with PHP (they've since dropped that goal).

That's cool. I had to learn some intricacies of PHP for a job once quite a while ago and the docs weren't quite sufficient. Could have used that. Language specs are typically harder to digest then other material but ultimately you can get all the details out of them you need and they're typically worth reading.

No, just a hammer.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-php-singularity/

SQL is in heavy use in almost every business and government agency. I'm not sure what your objection there is...

Languages that are in popular use often take decades to get there. Much of the software in the world has been there a while. The only thing surprising to me on this list is about how popular Go is after only a decade.

Yeah! "insert niche language that I use" isn't even number 1? That ranking system is just plain wrong!

Me: Everyone I know uses _language_, this is trash!

Also me: First programming job.

I'd love to see a study done on developers - how their first job has influenced their zealotry for programming languages / technologies

My first job involved RPG (Report Program Generator), one of the most loathsome and repulsive languages. Compared to RPG, COBOL is Python.

I'm surprised to see RPG is still a thing, not surprised its ranking is so low.

You live in a bubble. Most of us do, but you didn't know ;)