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I don't particularly like posts popularizing the TIOBE index. While most of the visible internet seems to be in English, to base your entire index on a string match of +"X programming" is not only naive, it forgoes any pages that might have been written in another language (*gasp*):

Ruby Programmierung
Ruby Programmation
Ruby Programação
Ruby 編程
Ruby プログラミング

While these might be literal translations for other languages, how many of these one-off queries will add relevant results to the data set? Are we to assume that German blogs, pages, and discussions are completely worthless and not relevant to the popularity of the Ruby Programming Language as a whole? Can you even find the phrase "Ruby Programming" in http://www.ruby-lang.org/zh_TW/ ?

I'm upset that we as English speaking people put so much relevance in such a biased, limited process to determine language popularity. Market forces are global, and not necessarily tied to English.

On a related note, do Google, MSN, Yahoo, et. al, translate pages to English for us in all cases so that we might not need to worry about this? Am I missing something?

Market forces might be global but the lingua franca of the programming world is English. Ruby for example -- are there many comments in the code in Japanese as compared to English? Linux was started in Finland -- any Finnish in the source code? etc. Especially in a globally distributed environment, when someone from Croatia and someone from San Jose and someone from Tangiers wants to talk about code, it's going to be in English almost every time.

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