Python use growing fast

[Dan Stromberg]

On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 5:22 PM, Krzysztof Bieniasz
<krzysztof.t.bieniasz at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Also depends on how one defines "popularity" in the context of
>> programming languages.
>
> Tiobe quite clearly states what they mean by the name "popularity".
> Namely the number of Google search results of expressions like
> "programming X" for X in languages. If no one in the Web writes about
> programming JavaScript then obviously it's not popular... sort of.
> --
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>

About JavaScript's popularity:
1) I've been getting the impression that JavaScript is popular in a
manner similar to how x86 machine language is popular: That is, it's
used all over, but few people hand code it (though admittedly, there
are probably more people hand coding JavaScript than people hand
coding x86 assembler today)
2) JavaScript seems widely considered a bit of a mess, and yet, many
tools make use of it because it's in almost all web browsers
3) It seems that when JavaScript does get used directly, it tends to
be done in small snippets, like inline assembler in C or C++
4) It appears that there is quite a few different tools (one of them,
our own Pyjamas, and to a lesser extent, Django - and of course GWT
though that's only tenuously related to Python through Pyjamas) that
attempt to take the pain out of writing JavaScript

IOW, I'm not convinced that Tiobe's ranking of JavaScript is
inaccurate, or even weakly correlated with reality.