LiveCode back on TIOBE

[Richard Gaskin]

For the first time in a while, LiveCode is back on the TIOBE Index of 
the top 100 most popular programming languages:

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

During the Kickstarter campaign and for a year or so after, LC was there 
off and on every few months.  But though I don't check monthly, I 
haven't seen it there in a while, so this is encouraging.

If it remains on the list consistently going forward, we'll have a 
reasonably good indicator of overall language adoption growth.

FWIW, this is the first month I can recall seeing where LiveCode was on 
this list but Xojo wasn't.


Other observations of note in the Feb 2018 index:

- Swift is still in the top 50 (#16, pretty good), but trending down,
   with a double-arrow suggesting more decline over last month than
   others in decline.

- Python and VB.net are up, VB up more.  Both VB editions are IIRC
   now open source and available for multiple platforms.

- If you look at the line chart in the middle of the page, even the most
   popular languages have an overall slight downward trend, suggesting
   greater diversification.

My take on this:

- Multi-platform languages are growing more than platform-specific ones.

- Programming is becoming increasingly polyglot, where fixation on one
   or two languages across one's career is gone in favor of expertise
   with a wider range of languages, each for different tasks.

For LC fans this could bode well, since at this stage few pros are in a 
position to replace their tooling with LC, but everyone can augment 
their tooling with it, since probably nothing else is a productive for 
making multi-platform GUIs.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems