Clojurians Log v2
off-topic 2026-05-22
Has anyone else noticed that Clojure crossed into the top 50 for TIOBE's index?! I was so used to seeing it listed in the bottom 50, that I thought it fell off the list entirely!
@didibus I've been searching a JavaScript-only job since 2023. I found literally zero jobs - all typescript. So no, I don't think it's this. In fact, if you look at the top-10 languages, Visual Basic and Delphi are present. Fortran and Scratch (a learning programming language) are 11 and 12. Assembly is more popular, according to their index, than Swift, Ruby, Kotlin, ObjectiveC, Lua, Typescript, Clojure, Scala, Zig... so no, there's nothing trustworthy about TIOBE.
Fair, it seems the methodology is: "How visible and talked-about is this language on the public internet?" So it's more about measuring internet content related to each language. And that justifies JS being high on the list.
its a good point - it is detached from reality. we could probably game it
It could be possible if there are JavaScript code bases everywhere which would make it highly popular but everyone has now switched to TypeScript for all future changes to those code bases. Which is why there are only TypeScript jobs.
I'm sorry, but the TIOBE index is completely out of touch with any possible reality. It's impossible for Javascript to be #6 and Typescript to be #35, when it's close to impossible to find Javascript jobs (even when the job mentions Javascript, it usually asks for Typescript instead).
An uptick related to "Clojure: The Documentary" maybe? I've started work on "Clojure: The Musical", in the hope of breaking us into the top 20. I was delighted to read that "MATLAB is close to dropping out of the TIOBE top 20" -- it's probably the language in which I've done substantial work that I most dislike.
@mauricio.szabo definitely a lot wanting in TIOBE, but still cool to have Clojure above Haskell, Scala, and Erlang-proper, and within a sneeze of the catch-all “Lisp”
In terms of actually relevant listings, I always tend to look at this one https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html but it doesn't include Clojure at all, and I’m sure has its own shortcomings besides that