> Github by itself is not enough; there are orders of magnitude more code outside of it and hence your assumption is wrong. Also most C/C++ folks prefer to keep code local (proprietary and personal reasons) and hence are not sampled.
"you're wrong man, C totally has a bunch of code being used thats private, I swear". you could say that about every single other language. only thing that matter is what can be measured. C is dead man, you are just in denial. its an old crap language that hasn't been relevant in at least a decade. if you need some evidence, just look to the fact that after decades it still doesn't have a package manager, so many people laughably just vendor code when working with C projects.
You broke the site guidelines egregiously in more than one place in this thread. That's not allowed here and we ban accounts that do it. Moreover, you've done it repeatedly in other places also, e.g.:
If you keep doing that, we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to ban you! Therefore if you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on, we'd appreciate it.
Among other things, that means not posting any more personal attacks.
TIOBE can remain transparent and also be seriously flawed in its methodology, which has been already questioned for many years. No popularity indicators would be entirely free from flaws, but anyone who are aware of TIOBE's possible flaws always quote multiple indicators including PYPL [1] and RedMonk Top 20 [2]. That's how you can remain convincing even with only possibly flawed data sources.
While C/C++ will remain an important language for many years, its continuing decline is also clear from those indicators. In fact even the most recent TIOBE has reported the lowest ever position (4th) for C, and that fact was already well known for other indicators: PYPL indicator for C was roughly in decline for a decade, so did its RedMonk ranking as well. They both estimate the current use of given language by looking at popularity of tutorials or questions, while TIOBE estimates the cumulative use of given language. All things equal, TIOBE is going to be systematically delayed compared to others, yet still TIOBE ranking for C is now falling and there is no reason to believe otherwise.
What you are pointing out is nothing revelatory. That a statistical index is dependent on data and methodology is a vacuously true statement and not an argument. That there are multiple indexes trying to measure the same thing is also true and not an argument. The point was to show an index which is well respected (criticisms not withstanding) as a counter to silly claims.
I personally do not place much stock in these rankings since all of them are flawed in their sampling methodology due to using only publicly accessible indicators like google searches, stack overflow questions, job postings, Github and similar public repositories etc. C programmers on average are more experienced and hence have no need for these. They are already aware of most of the Good/Bad/Ugly about the language and are used to working out problems for themselves and hence don't show up in these metrics. Thus C/C++ rankings might appear to be waning when they are holding steady or rising much more slowly w.r.t. others.
"you're wrong man, C totally has a bunch of code being used thats private, I swear". you could say that about every single other language. only thing that matter is what can be measured. C is dead man, you are just in denial. its an old crap language that hasn't been relevant in at least a decade. if you need some evidence, just look to the fact that after decades it still doesn't have a package manager, so many people laughably just vendor code when working with C projects.