Unfortunately, Bjarne Stroustrup himself disagrees with you that TIOBE represents the "facts":

> Most of the popular measures basically measures noise and ought to report their findings in decibel rather than "popularity." [1]

I believe he is wise enough to not change his opinion when TIOBE designated C++ as the Programming Language of the Year 2022 (which would mean, borrowing his words, C++ somehow kept making lots of noise).

[1] https://stroustrup.com/bs_faq.html#decline

your link never said what you claim, and in fact he says it's gaining in popularity if he has to guess.

Please stop citing Tiobe.

https://blog.nindalf.com/posts/stop-citing-tiobe/

do you have a better source? stack overflow says the same thing.

A better source for what? It doesn't boil down to one metric or statistic.

I see you didn't actually read the link I pasted, especially not the section "Evaluating languages for projects". There's several possible ways you can compare (StackOverflow survey, JetBrains survey, GitHub PRs, StackOverflow trends, Google trends) but ultimately it comes down to what's a good fit for your project.

- Can developers be hired/trained to use it?

- Will they be happy using it?

- What will our development velocity be on this language? What will be the operational burden of keeping it running in production?

- Do we need to rely on third party code? Does that code already exist and what is its quality?

Only your team can answer these questions for your project in particular. It depends on your business problem, your local jobs market, your engineering budget.

The claim being made in the original post and subsequent posts is that c++ is losing popularity. this claim is not true, and all evidence points to it gaining in popularity despite the HN echo chamber that it's too hard.

I still see you didn't read what I wrote. Please, just take a moment to read before firing off a comment.

I didn't make the claim that C++ is losing popularity, but I did mention some sources that do. These are marginal, not dramatic declines. Certainly not a terminal decline.

- Number of people searching Google - https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2012-07-31%202...

- Number of questions asked on StackOverflow that month - https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=java%2Cc%2B%2...

A far cry from the claim that it's "dominating and gaining", as you said.

The original claim is "C++ is becoming a legacy language". This is clearly a claim about the trend of C++'s popularity over many years. You're trying to refute that claim with a single data point about one year, which isn't sufficient to refute a trend. For example, a single bad day in the stock market doesn't refute the claim "the stock market is trending up over the year". Moreover, your data point is probably just noise--a 4% swing when the error margins are closer to 50%. TIOBE is basically just guessing, and a guess isn't evidence.

FWIW, I've been a professional C++ programmer, and I like C++.

>You're trying to refute that claim with a single data point about one year, which isn't sufficient to refute a trend.

Below the list a graph showing the ratings over a 20 year period is provided. It shows C++ declining until about ~2017 but recently starting rising again.

Except Tiobe can't be taken seriously.

https://blog.nindalf.com/posts/stop-citing-tiobe/

I like how one commenter put it over on Lobste.rs (https://lobste.rs/s/fdcpy3/fish_shell_be_rewritten_rust#c_sm...):

> TIOBE has +/- 50% error margin and even if the data wasn’t unusable, it’s misrepresented (measuring mentions picked by search engine algorithms over a historical corpus, not just current year, not actual usage). It’s so bad that I think it’s wrong to even mention it with “a grain of salt”. It’s a developer’s horoscope.

> TIOBE thinks C popularity has halved one year and tripled next year. It thinks a niche db query language from a commercial product discontinued in 2007 is more popular in 2023 than TypeScript. I can’t emphasize enough how garbage this data is, even the top 10. It requires overlooking so many grave errors that it exists only to reinforce preexisting beliefs.

again, use a better source if you don't like it.

I prefer to avoid horoscopes altogether.