Comment Re:Linkedin used to be better (Score 1) 96
hint on who it is: Their headquarters are at One Microsoft Way, Redmond WA
LoB
I'm perpetually mystified how TIOBE is considered to be in any way reputable.
It's just searching for "$LANGUAGE programming" in various engines and applying magic fudge factors.
It's not an indicator of jobs, or activity, or much of anything else really. This is especially obvious with things like Visual Basic showing up weirdly close to the top, and having large spikes, as if there were times when VB suddenly got a huge influx in demand.
VB never even transitioned to 64 bits, it's that old. VB.NET i suppose exists but seems mostly pointless since it all compiles down to CIL anyway. Might as well use C#.
What do you mean by that? They both work out to the same thing just with a different syntax.
TIOBE basically searches a bunch of search engines and other things for "$LANGUAGE programming", applies some magical fudge factor and calls that a result.
It's absolute nonsense. It's highly manipulable if you can convince people to use the " programming" wording. It's going to be highly affected by the appearance and disappearance of documentation websites. It will of course still pick up ancient archives of stuff that nobody is actually using today.
I have an extreme skepticism of that VB is anywhere near the top 10. The original VB died long, long ago. VB.NET wasn't backwards compatible in the slightest and I don't think it ever had much adoption, because what's even the point? You might as well use C# instead. In fact long ago I had a VB project I considered transitioning to VB.NET and quickly decided it wasn't worth it, and went with C#. That was somewhere in the early 2000s, and I don't think it's gotten any more appealing since.
TIOBE is still nonsense of the highest order, not sure why anyone bothers using it.
It's some search engine counts based voodoo. Maybe not the most terrible metric possible, but I have no idea why it's the one always being discussed when there's better things one could measure at this point. Like say, GitHub.
If we want to know what's currently most popular, what we should want is measuring the actual usage. That might be projects, or commits, depending.
I never understood Mozilla's foray into AI.
There's just nothing about Mozilla that suggests to me they are experts on the subject matter and have much to contribute in the area. I could be wrong, but Mozilla is so tightly associated to the web that it just was a hard sell to me that their AI efforts were going to go anywhere from the start.
But if I tell an LLM "Thanks that suggestion worked" that feedback is lost to the void. There's no upvoting, no storage that I know of applying to all other questions people ask to let the system know "yes that answer worked particularly well". So all the LLMs can go on giving out the same answers forever not really knowing they are flawed... unless someone publishes an article about it.
There's no reason why LLMs can't have feedback mechanisms. In fact they do. ChatGPT has thumbs up and thumbs down buttons. It almost definitely tracks usage of download and copy to clipboard buttons.
I mean on the low end.
Like formerly a small business would pay for the valuable HTML and FTP knowledge, but today many will just use Wix instead.
And more complex things are more proper webdev and not just knowing some HTML tags.
I remember there was a short time when the web was new and "webmaster" was a profitable occupation. Then a combination of improved web design software, CMSes, frameworks and the like quickly ate the low end, and the higher end just got rolled into software development.
I'm not sure why anyone thought that knowing what keywords a specific model recognizes best could ever be an enduring form of employment. To me it was always clearly extremely temporary.
We have a equal opportunity Calculus class -- it's fully integrated.