Re: maintaining skills

I had a nice response from the tiobe.com ranking of pgm languages:
<quote>
Thanks for your feedback on the TPC index.
You are right about the fact that there are false positives for some
languages, especially the programming language consisting of a single
character or the ones that contain a general term such as "Scheme". We are
currently automating the search queries. This will help us to weed out all
rubbish. For instance a site containing the phrase "C:\programming" counts
now for the C programming language. This will gradually change in the
future. The same holds for RPG and "Role Playing Games". Once we can
differentiate more easily by just adding something to a configuration file,
the number of false positives will decrease considerably. I hope you have
some patience...

Nevertheless, I do think that popularity can be measured by search engine
hits. Job sites only count for shortage of engineers and are focussed on
business languages. Although there only 25 job openings for Pascal and 289
for RPG, I know for sure that Pascal is indeed more popular. It is used at
many universities to teach people programming. I am not sure about IDL, this
has also to do with a false positive. There appear to be two IDL programming
languages. One of them is heavily promoted by a certain David Fanning. In
the IDL newsgroups his signature contains consequently "Coyote's Guide to
IDL programming". Very clever:-)...

Regards,
Paul--
Paul Jansen - TIOBE Software, http://www.tiobe.com
De Zaale 11 Postbus 80 5600 AB Eindhoven, the Netherlands