Why is TIOBE still talked about? Their data is complete nonsense. Don't believe me? Look at how it's made:

[1]https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-in... [tiobe.com]

It's basically searching for "$LANGUAGE programming" on various search engines, then taking the "5 million results found" counts. After that they use some fudge factor they seem to have come up by themselves. Why is google.com worth 7.69%? Why is Wikipedia the second in the list, do mentions on Wikipedia go up and down by language popularity? Why is google.co.uk in the list, when it also returns English results?

Does Google even promise that the result count they display is remotely accurate?

Let alone that this barely means anything if it worked because it's trivial for anyone to inflate counts by encouraging the use of the term, or it can also go down if some prominent site happens to go down.

It's an absolutely terrible metric and I don't understand why anyone cares about it. At least try to be remotely accurate. Look at Stack Overflow activity. Look at commits on Github. Look at subreddits. Something that indicates actual usage at a given point in time.

[1] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programminglanguages_definition/

Java? Rust? Get serious, world. Does Mommy massage your wrists while you type, so her pwecious angew doesn't get carpal tunnel? If you're not managing your own memory, are you even really programming? Ideally, I'd like a language that lets me adjust my own voltage and Hertz.

...of CHEAP software engineers is drying up

Companies prefer tools that allow cheap and low skilled coders to quickly churn out mediocre code

I care about what employers choose. I like to get paid. New programming languages honestly rub me the wrong way as every person I've ever met who pursues new languages does so as a substitute for mastering an older one. Most people who have written in 10 languages have never mastered a single one. If you know what you're doing?...the old languages are perfectly fine.

For me, libraries make a much bigger difference than languages. Java is my main language and there are dozens of things it can do better....but I rarely write PURE Java. Most of what I've ever needed to do has been written and is in a library somewhere. I spend more time assembling library code than writing pure Java. But even when I do...it's fine...some languages do things maybe 5-10% better, but it really never adds up.

I will wager that if Rust is a night and day difference for you, then you didn't learn your old language correctly. Certainly, that was the case for everyone I've ever met who jumped ship to node.js and Python.

Great...you improved your productivity slightly by moving to Python/node.js/Rust...now you can write novice code even faster?

IMHO C is still one of the most useful languages and perfectly fine even for large projects (why should this have changed suddenly after many decades?).

Safety is an issue but there are also many great tools to help with this and which get better continuously (e.g. GCC's analyzer), and the alternatives have their fair share of problems too.

All languages as the final step of their compilation are rendered into assembly language. All the low-level bits of an OS that deal directly with the hardware are also written, at least partially in assembly language. Ditto low-level library bits like memcpy. Assembly language is the giant upon whose shoulders all else rests.