Think it's a matter of if a person is limiting themselves to an evangelistic echo chamber. If one confined themselves to only HN, likely to get the impression from the enthusiastic fans of Rust and Zig, that they ranked #1 and #2, where in the real world that's definitely not the case. Languages like C# (#5) and Golang (#11), rank way above Rust in the real world, but get way less shine than would be expected. It's like being a heretic, for even mentioning Object Pascal (#8), Ada (#17), or Kotlin (#20) around here. Yet, all those rank above Zig (#49). Hell, Vlang (#41) is ranked above Zig on TIOBE (November 2025).
There appears to be a lot of noise in the Tiobe already. What does it mean if Visual Basic is shooting up and C is near the top? They are surely in no way measuring the same programming market -- so who cares?
Oh, 14th [1]. That's a lot lower than I would have expected, based purely on the amount of noise surrounding Rust.
[1] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/