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/