Python grew fastest in web searches for 'tutorial' over the last 5 years

I cannot take seriously a programming language popularity index that states that Javascript has become significantly less popular in the last year. I'm no fanboy but given the sheer weight of evidence from language activity on sites like github to the incredible number of jobs and recruiters desperate for skilled javascript developers it just does not add up. Sometimes a metric producing an unexpected outlier means you've found something interesting but usually it means your metric is broken or meaningless. Searches for the word tutorial sounds like an increasingly meaningless metric the world of sites like stackoverflow.

According to Google Trends the search term "jquery" will soon overtake "javascript" in terms of popularity[1][2]<p>[1]<a href="http://i.imgur.com/yqQ95.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/yqQ95.png</a><p>[2]<a href="http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=jquery,javascript" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=jquery,javascript</a>

This is based on search engine results!?<p>"The ratings are calculated by counting hits of the most popular search engines.... The number of hits determines the ratings of a language" -- <a href="http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/tpci_definition.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/tpci_d...</a><p>How could that indicate anything other then more pages found by the search engines. How do you know the bias of the engine over time isn't giving better results and the "search trend" ranking is causing the results to skew in one direction or another.<p>I doubt search engine trends are a really accurate way to understand how much code is out there and what people are actually doing on a daily basis.<p>Worse the search term is: +"&#60;language&#62; programming"<p>More sites have "python programming" in them then "perl programming" and way more have "java programming" in them?<p>This tells me nothing really. I could argue it tells me Java is hard as hell and you have to have lots of references to figure out how to do anything.. Or it tells me that Java has lots of "java programming" sites. Heck maybe it tells us that lots of people host javadocs and every single page says "Java Programming" &#60;reference, docs etc.&#62;.<p>All that said I am actually enjoying python a lot and find myself writing more of my "you choose the language" projects in it. It feels like it will be more maintainable over time and I have the general feeling I can turn it over to others easier then a pile of Perl. I have to really write careful in Perl to make it readable by non-Perl heads. Python sort of forces that on you up-front. I'm still not a fan of having to use SPACES (COBOL anyone!!) to maintain blocks of code but I'm slowly getting used to it and using vim settings to make it easier etc.

These kind of popularity metrics really leave a sour taste in my mouth, regardless of the results. They're just so lacking in rigor of even the mildest degree that it's not even worth considering what they "discover".<p>If any language is to be the "language of the decade", it ought to be C, and possibly C++. C or C++ still power basically every piece of truly important software, even today in 2013. The major operating system kernels, userlands, compilers, interpreters (including Python's main implementation!), network servers, and web browsers, are all written in one or both of them, for example. And that's not including the many embedded and industrial uses of C that aren't very visible at all.<p>Until some other languages offer the same full-stack experience, and are actually used for writing critical, widely-used software, I don't think we can label any languages but C and C++ as the "language of the year", or "language of the decade", or even "language of the century" and beyond.

Guido van Rosseum left Google a while ago because he was annoyed they weren't using Python enough! Python is a nice language but I don't think it's the language of the decade. The langage of the decade is something that has been used from 2000 to 2012 a lot in entreprise and by individuals. Give that price to PHP for all it's worth. PHP was the language for the web for a very long time.... It was used to create facebook. It was a lot more influential than Python. Ask 50 persons in the street if they know what PHP is, then ask them if they know what Python is. I guarantee you that more people know of PHP.<p>Predicting what will be the next language of the decade is more interesting. My bet is on Javascript for now.

The symmetric, "curious dance" between C and C# in 2009-2011 could be due to the fact that "#" is not a alphanumerical character. Some searches for "C#" may have been miscounted as searches for "C" in that period. (But that's just an hypothesis.)

At first I was about to dismiss this as TIOBE-like crap. But giving it a second thought, there is a <i>deep</i> difference in methodology.<p>TIOBE - language is popular if "&#60;language&#62; tutorial" brings up lots of results on Google This page - language is popular if many people searched "&#60;language&#62; tutorial".<p>It's not hard to see that the second one is a much more interesting metric. That said, it's still far from being enough to evaluate a language's popularity. On the other hand, it can be at least mildly correlated with the amount of people wanting to learn said language over the measured period of time.

The analysis assumes that more searches for tutorials means the language is more popular where as it might just mean the language requires more tutorials to understand.

After reading the FAQ I agree that using the term "&#60;lang&#62; tutorial" is better than "&#60;lang&#62; programming" - but couldn't the results for "&#60;lang&#62; tutorial" possible represent languages that are harder to grasp, rather than languages in popular use.<p>Then again, if that was purely the case we'd be seeing "brainf<i></i>k" all over the place.<p>Just a thought.

In our country, there are 80% developers are using .net/C#. They know how to use svn, cut CSS from Photoshop, code a website, do webform, but they don't know what JSON is, what GIT is, what Linux is, what a Message Queue, or Redis is. Hm, i don't know why .net is so popular. What .net can do, the Linux-based technologies can do.

Extrapolating "popularity" for google search volume is a huge pet peeve. I see no reason to believe this data means anything.

If you look at USA and look at which state is the darkest for all of the search terms, California is the darkest for each.

&#62; which language is taking advantage of PHP's decline<p>Until you notice that Y-axis is logarithmic...