The all-time high that was thirty-second place

Dark stock-ticker-style line chart titled “Perl: a decade of climbing the charts”, masthead “Curly Bracket Capital · Language Market Watch · July 2026”, plotting Perl’s monthly TIOBE chart position from July 2015 to July 2026 on an ordinary up-means-more axis, so the line climbs from 11 in 2015 toward the top of the frame. A green badge reads “▲ +100% since 2015”; Perl’s best months — position 8 in 2016–17 — are dismissed in grey italics as “the 2016–17 slump”; the peak of 32 in January 2025 is crowned “all-time high · 32 · Jan 2025 ✓”; the 2025 plunge back to 9 is ringed in dashed red as “the ’25 flash crash — 23 places gone in seven months”; and the final rise to 22 is cheered in green as “the rebound ▲ 22 and climbing”. Every number is a real TIOBE position; position 32 is Perl’s lowest ever, and position 9 its best in years. — Showing the misleading chart

The identical monthly positions on a light background with the axis inverted so #1 sits at the top, kicked “The same line · with #1 where it belongs” and titled “Rank runs backwards: the climb was a slide”: the line drifts down from the top ten — best #8 in 2016–17 — to Perl’s lowest-ever TIOBE position, #32 in January 2025, then rallies to #9 by August 2025, labelled “the comeback the first chart called a crash”, before sliding back to #22 by July 2026, “most of it handed back”. A note card explains that rank is a backwards ruler — smaller is better, so an honest rank chart puts #1 at the top, as Billboard and the app stores do — and credits TIOBE positions via Dave Cross’s tiobe.perlhacks.com tracker, noting both charts are our own demonstration. — Showing the misleading chart

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Plot Perl’s TIOBE chart position on an ordinary up-means-more axis and the language has spent a decade rallying — +100% since 2015, an “all-time high” of 32 in January 2025, a terrifying flash crash right after. But rank runs backwards: the high was Perl’s worst month in TIOBE history, and the crash was a genuine comeback into the top ten.

TIOBE Programming Community Index — monthly Perl positions, July 2015–July 2026, via Dave Cross’s tiobe.perlhacks.com tracker; peak/trough milestones from tiobe.com, 2026Added July 23, 2026

01The claim

$PERL has been climbing the charts for a decade — from a modest 11 in 2015 to an all-time high of 32 by January 2025, +100% and making higher highs the whole way. Even the flash crash of 2025 couldn’t keep it down: the ticker has already rebounded to 22 and climbing.

02The trick

Every point is a real TIOBE position, plotted the month it was published — the only editorial decision is which way the axis runs. A chart position is a rank, and rank is a backwards ruler: #1 is the summit, 32nd is the cellar, so the quantity runs opposite to the goodness. Drape it over the default up-means-more axis and every slope reads in reverse — which is exactly what the stock-ticker dressing is priming you to do, because a decade of “up and to the right” only means winning when up means better. So the chart cheers a slide: the “all-time high” of 32 in January 2025 is Perl’s lowest position in the index’s recorded history, the “2016–17 slump” at 8 was its best month of the plotted decade, and the “flash crash” that erased 23 places in seven months was Perl’s genuine 2025 comeback into the top ten. Even the badge is true arithmetic in a backwards cause: 11 to 22 really is +100%, of a number you want low. This is the museum’s inverted-axis crime in a mirror — our other exhibits flip a count axis so that more plots lower; here the chart leaves a backwards-running quantity unflipped, and the same convention does the same damage in the opposite direction. (This exhibit is our own demonstration in the house style of a markets-newsletter ticker chart, drawn from TIOBE’s published monthly positions rather than from any real outlet’s graphic.)

03The fix

Flip the axis — for once that is the fix, not the crime. Rank charts are the one habitat where the honest y-axis runs “inverted”, #1 at the top, the way Billboard prints the Hot 100, the app stores draw their charts, and Dave Cross’s own Perl tracker plots this very series. With #1 restored to the top the decade reads right: Perl drifted from the edge of the top ten (best: #8, 2016–17) to #32 by January 2025 — its lowest month since TIOBE records began in 2001 — then staged a startling seven-month rally back to #9 by August 2025. That comeback was real enough that TIOBE’s CEO, asked why Perl was surging, double-checked the underlying data and confirmed the rise without being able to explain it; by July 2026 most of it had been handed back at #22, on 0.71% of the index. The plotted decade is itself only the tail of a longer slide — TIOBE clocked Perl at #3 in May 2005, when it held around ten percent of the whole index. The tell costs one glance: before trusting any slope, find which way the ruler runs — on a chart of ranks, look for where #1 is, and treat golf scores, race times, error rates and queue lengths with the same suspicion, because every smaller-is-better series can pull this trick. And keep one eyebrow raised at the yardstick itself: a TIOBE position measures each language’s share of search-engine hits for “<language> programming”, so a chart position can move when the web moves, not the code.