Why C

[Baldrick]

Just been wondering for no particular reason, what does "C" actually stand for in the language?

[ts-soft]

Besides, C rested on the programming language B which had written Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie in the years 1969/70.
B again developed programming language BCPL goes back on from Martin Richard's middle of the 1960s.

But i think, there is no A

[naw]

- I think BCPL stood / stands for Basic Combined (or Compiled) Programming Language

[Tenaja]

I read it was their third attempt.

[DarkDragon]

Why didn't you also ask about D, S and R?

[juror]

But i think, there is no A

There was an A- (A minus), which was touted as being just a bit better than B+

Actually, it was just a B+ pre-processor that provided features like "real variable names" and the ability to use names instead of numbers for program location.

[Tenaja]

Why didn't you also ask about D, S and R?

In terms of use, D is not even in the top 20... and even ADA made it there! (Although I am a little surprised Lua and assembly did not.)

source:
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/ ... index.html

[xorc1zt]

tiobe index rely on search engines

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/ ... nition.htm

The ratings are calculated by counting hits of the most popular search engines. The search query that is used is

+"<language> programming"

This search query is executed for the top 9 websites of Alexa that meet the following conditions:

The entry page of the site contains a search facility
The result of querying the site contains an indication of the number of page hits

Based on these criteria currently the following search engines are used:

Google: 30%
Blogger: 30%
Wikipedia: 15%
YouTube: 9%
Baidu: 6%
Yahoo!: 3%
Bing: 3%
Amazon: 3%

The number of hits determines the ratings of a language. The counted hits are normalized for each search engine for the first 50 languages. In other words, the first 50 languages together have a score of 100%. Let's define "hits50(SE)" as the sum of the number of hits for the first 50 languages for search engine SE and "hits(PL,SE)" as the number of hits for programming language PL for search engine SE. Possible false positives for a query are already filtered out in the definition of "hits(PL,SE)". This is done by using a manually determined confidence factor per query. A query such as "Basic programming" also returns pages that contain "Improve your basic programming skills in Java". The first 100 pages per search engine are checked for possible false positives and this is used to define the confidence factor. If this factor is 90%, then only 90% of the hits are used for "hits(PL,SE)". An overview of the confidence factor can be found in the groupings table below.

The ratings are calculated with the following formula:

((hits(PL,SE1)/hits50(SE1) + ... + hits(PL,SEn)/hits50(SEn))/n

where n is the number of search engines used.

[Tenaja]

tiobe index rely on search engines

Yes, but search engines are a great benchmark for language popularity. If a language is not searched for, it is not used.

[xorc1zt]

the index rely on the results provided by the search engines. a better way would be to compute the number of projects for each languages on google code, source force, github, ...

another index : http://lang-index.sourceforge.net/

[Tenaja]

Ok, but still, 14th place with 1.214%? Who cares?

That was more my point that the exact position. And if you really think that site is so much more accurate, then nobody writes in ASM.