Python use growing fast

[Corey Richardson]

On 01/10/2011 10:24 PM, Dan Stromberg wrote:
> 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.

The biggest use of JavaScript I've seen is browser-based games using
them for some display magic, windows popping up etc. Their back-end is
still VB.NET (or x framework), and none of the lifting is done by
JavaScript.