18 January 2008 · popularity, programming language, python, tiobe index

Yet another article meriting screaming headlines declares Python to be the language of 2007. But on the home page of the python.org website the "news" is that Python 3.0a2 was released on December 9 and there was a Python Bug Day on January 19 (hang on a minute, that publication date has to be wrong, it's 36 hours in the future—someone's been borrowing Guido's time machine again). Anyway, it's nice to see Python getting good headlines, even if it doesn't yet shout them abroad as effectively as it might.

Apparently Python has moved up from #8 to #6 in TIOBE's last table, but unfortunately their obtuse use of web technology (frames within frames, some of them dynamically populated by client-side code) makes it somewhat difficult to link to their explanation of how they compute the results. I suspect myself that a large part of Python's improvement is due to the increasing visibility of IronPython, the Microsoft-supported .NET Python implementation. One rather sad quote for the old guard: "Perl is just dead".

But now I have another blog entry to write.