Notable is the search-engine-optimized rise of Groovy from #82 to #17 in a mere 12 months. The subsequent TIOBE comment &quot;Scala might gain a permanent top 20 position soon&quot; is probably a back-handed dig by TIOBE at the likely impermanence of Groovy&#x27;s top 20 position.<p>The last time Groovy made the top 20, it hit #18 in Oct 2013, but 3 months later (Jan 2014), had dropped back out of the top 50 (#32 in Nov, #46 in Dec). TIOBE said the following month &quot;The data is produced by one of the Chinese sites that we track is interpreted incorrectly by our algorithms. After we fixed this bug, Groovy lost much of its ratings.&quot; But before that fix happened, interviews with the current Apache spokesperson for Groovy (Guillaume Laforge) promoting Groovy&#x27;s top 20 position were published in 5 online rags (www.infoworld.com, www.eweek.com, cacm.acm.org, jaxenter.com, and glaforge.appspot.com), and all of them quickly appeared in Google&#x27;s top 30 search results for &quot;groovy programming&quot; and remained there for 6 to 12 months afterwards.<p>It&#x27;s a good bet that same feedback effect will be engineered before Groovy starts losing its new top 20 ranking, perhaps before next month.<p>In fact, this sort of thing also happened with Groovy in December 2010. Groovy began a sudden rise from outside the top 50 when Groovy tech lead Jochen Theodorou &quot;volunteered&quot; his services to Tiobe in late 2010 to help them improve their algorithms. In April 2011, however, Groovy fell from #25 to #65 on Tiobe in a single month after they increased the number of search engines they monitor.<p>These fleeting peaks for Groovy in the TIOBE rankings (#25 in Apr 2011, #18 in Oct 2013, #17 in Jan 2016) between its usual ranking of somewhere between #51 and #100 (e.g. #82 only 12 months ago) are a bad thing for Groovy because of damage to its reputation as a solid language suitable for long-term IT solutions. Such ranking volatility gives off the stench of smoke-and-mirrors marketing intended to benefit a single stake-holder, probably the person who the groovy-lang.org DNS domain is the personal property of.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.infoworld.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;application-development&#x2F;c-pulls-away-java-among-top-programming-languages-230603" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.infoworld.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;application-development&#x2F;c-pulls-a...</a>