Better than TIOBE at least, which seems to have gathered a huge amount of popularity for no good reason.
Their metric is just to search for "$LANG programming" in various engines, then assign arbitrary weights depending on the search engine used. It doesn't really measure anything, and has already been gamed intentionally, since it's so simple.
Every metric is going to have its pitfalls, but at least this one seems to be measuring something that approaches reality.
I think job listings are the least biased statistics on language popularity, as there is no too significant difference in productivity between high level languages, so the number of people required will be roughly linear to the jobs.
According to that the top 3 are js, python and java, in some order. I think it’s a good Litmus-test to fail statistics that have a different top ranking (TIOBE being beyond useless, having listed Visual Basic as 6th some time ago?!)
My memory is hazy, but it was ahead of goddamn javascript.
Also, the 3 lines of scripts it is used for is hardly a big amount. Excel is big, but when companies grow out of it they go for integration with “proper” applications instead.
Their metric is just to search for "$LANG programming" in various engines, then assign arbitrary weights depending on the search engine used. It doesn't really measure anything, and has already been gamed intentionally, since it's so simple.
Every metric is going to have its pitfalls, but at least this one seems to be measuring something that approaches reality.