In questioning the Tiobe index, the article doesn't even mention fellow JVM language Groovy's suspicious behavior. Click on "Groovy" and you'll see the graph at http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index?page=Groovy which shows it rose from 0.33% to 1.8% in the last two months, and from 0.11% to 1.8% in the last 12 months -- both very fishy.

The graph shows these sudden peaks have happened before (Apr 2011, June 2012, Oct 2013) and are always followed by just-as-sudden falls. Check out the definition of the TIOBE ranking at http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/tiobe_index?page=programmingl... and you'll see Groovy's backer (the individual who privately owns the groovy-lang.org DNS domain) can game the ranking by "optimizing" any one of 23 of those 25 sites monitored. Groovy's long-term usual ranking for the last 10 years has been 0.1%.