> Crystal has gotten a highly distinguished mention in this month's update > summary of the prestigious TIOBE prog lang popularity index: > >> The top programming languages are in a long term decline: both Java and C >> have all time low scores in the TIOBE index. And almost all of the other top >> 10 languages are going down as well year to year. >> >> So what languages are taking advantage of this? It is all happening down in >> the charts around position 40. A new set of languages is gaining ground, >> notably Crystal (#32), Kotlin (#41), Clojure (#42), Hack (#43) and Julia >> (#46). >> >> Especially Crystal with its jump from position 60 to 32 in one month is >> doing very well. The Crystal programming language is a statically typed Ruby >> variant. Since it is compiled it is superfast and has a small memory >> footprint without losing the feeling of being easy to use. It seems >> worthwhile to give it a try. > > This is very impressive, given that Crystal is a 3-year-old newcomer that > we've watched take its first steps, while Nim is still fighting its way into > the top 100...
This has just made me realise how unreliable TIOBE is. This is one of the searches that they use: [+"crystal programming"](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%2B%22crystal+programming%22). Last time I checked (when I was submitting Nim to TIOBE) the number of results was around 20k. Now it's 256k? Go's is [331k](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%2B"go+programming";) (and strangely enough it was 230k, less than 5 minutes ago when I checked it before writing this post, proving once again how unreliable this is). D's is [225k](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%2B"D+programming";). Now, sure, TIOBE uses multiple search engines to make its ranking. But I doubt it makes much of a difference to the reliability of these results. I could be wrong but I seriously doubt that Crystal is so close to Go's popularity and that it's more popular than D. And actually TIOBE itself lists Crystal (#32) as being more popular than Clojure (#42), I'm very sceptical that this is the case. It seems to me that results such as [these](http://hibiscusmooncrystalacademy.com/how-to-program-a-crystal/) are giving this result count boost. They obviously have nothing to do with the programming language. IMO we can nowadays do a much better job at finding the popularity of a language by combining a number of indicators. For example: commit frequency on GitHub, number of watchers on GitHub, number of projects in that language on GitHub, activity and number of users in the respective language's IRC/Gitter/Slack channels. I would have built something that combines all of these already if I had the time because I am very interested in such statistics. So yeah, let's take this with a pinch of salt.
