The TIOBE index is based on search queries. I stopped relying on it years ago, and I imagine this will become less and less relevant over the coming years.

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programminglanguages_defin...

Aside from my doubts about the way this is measured, is it even a good strategy to simply chase the currently "most popular" languages?

A few years ago I shared an office with three aged graybeards who sat in a corner and spent 3 half-days per week silently working on legacy COBOL systems. I thought they were something of a joke, and said so when a person with insight into their invoicing was present. They corrected my impression.

How much were they making for 12 hour weeks?

I am curious how much of python’s rise is a result of the data/ai rise and people wanting to be a part of that. Is it being used to consistently build production applications? If the TIOBE is mostly lines of code, which it’s description seems to indicate, are their any other indexes that are something like “production lines of code”?

As a guy who started off as a PHP developer and graduated into a jack of all trades, with only so much time and different types of problems to solve, and before AI, the objective for me has been to economize my learning capacity and not double up on learning languages to solve the same domains of problems.

To that end, I’ve always seen Python and Ruby as similar except Python has all the data goodness and a slightly less popular web framework for which I could always fallback on PHP (Laravel) if I need a web framework that got it all.

Betting on Python a decade ago was a good use of my time.

> Betting on Python a decade ago was a good use of my time.

Would you make the same bet today? Or if not, what other language/technology would you bet on?

How do you define "production application" though? Customer facing? Running 24/7 to keep systems alive?

Python is great for making scripts, e.g. to process logs or quickly analyse and plot data for example. I've seen so many of these Python scripts and internal apps that are critical to customer support and keeping other systems healthy. They might not be in the critical path but they help with and speed up work.

> "But now they seem to have lost traction and are likely to go out of fashion."

That is one way of looking at it - an alternative interpretation is that mobile development has hit a plateau.

I don't think someone starting an iOS or Android app today would pick Objective-C/Java, but maybe there are less mobile apps being made today?

To sum up what I am saying:

  They won't disappear but they won't rise again.

Anyone got good data on this?

I still write Android apps exclusively in Java, albeit it's Java 17. The most recent new app I started was in 2022.

I don't know Kotlin and don't want to know it. The one time I had to deal with an app with parts of it in Kotlin, doing anything in those parts felt like coding through molasses.

Wow Objective C still banging.

I am surprised by this to be honest. Though, I have to assume things like React Native, Flutter, etc are becoming more common... Why write all your mobile code twice when you can hire a team that targets both platforms with one shared codebase.

Because you'll still need UX experts for each platform. And people who know how to get through the App Store review. And expertise to handle each platform's quirks, push notification implementation limitations, etc.

Things like ReactNative or miss exactly the same point that CEOs firing engineers over LLMs or vibe coders do: the code was _never_ the problem. It's all the domain expertise that allowed you to produce said code.

Do you know how often I use an app that was clearly built for Android, but also happens to run on iOS? Most likely once, and then never again. Because all the conventions are wrong, and it requires more effort than what I'm willing to give it.

Granted, I haven't played around with Flutter so maybe I'm unaware of how good these cross-platform solutions have become, but still.

You can still have RN dev focused on Apple nuances, and another for Android? They can work together towards a common goal, what you're also missing with React Native is that the UI is platform specific, the business logic is fully shared however.

>Wow Objective C still banging.

Objective-C is a fantastic language. Apple is still writing tons of it. It's the C++ we should have ended up with. Protocol oriented programming is an absolute revelation if you've never been exposed to it before. And being a superset, the ability to seamlessly drop in and out of pure C within the same file is something no other language can do. It also happens to have the most highly cohesive, battle tested, well documented interface libraries in existence for native desktop apps with Cocoa/AppKit/CoreGraphics et.al.

One thing I've found recently is that Obj-C actually works extremely well with agentic coding tools too. Having header files is like a cheat code for them. You don't have to fill your context with implementation code; just the interfaces, and the agent can actually reason about an entire huge codebase.