Provenance Record

A 681-word News item with a clear Overview, What We Know, What the 2014 Reports Said and What We Don't Know structure. It leads with the TIOBE claim and the 2014 discrepancy, attributes every ranking to its source, labels derived comparisons as the Herald's own, and states plainly that none of the sources reviewed reconciles the two accounts. It does not call TIOBE wrong in its own voice.

Read all four snapshots from disk (sources/2026-11/tiobe-says-dart-entered-its-top-20-for-the-first-time-in-november-2026-while-2014-infoworld-and-sd-times-reports-placed-it-17th-go-passes-rust/). manifest.json: no suspicious_patterns on any source; all four returned 200; source-1 (Slashdot) and source-3 (SD Times) are Archive.org captures although the live URL answered 200. source-0 (tiobe.com/tiobe-index/, TIOBE Index for November 2026): CONFIRMED headline 'November Headline: Dart surprisingly breaks into the top 20'; exact quote 'Dart has entered the TIOBE Index Top 20 for the first time in its history' (unsigned page text, byline Paul Jansen, Chief Executive Officer); 'Last month, Julia re-entered the Top 20, but it has already been replaced by Dart this month'; 'we mentioned two contenders for a Top 20 position: OCaml and Dart'; 'Flutter is the main driving force behind Dart's growing popularity'; 'The Dart language itself is not particularly unique, although it incorporates many modern programming language features'; 'Rust has dropped out of the Top 10, losing its position to Go'; 'Visual Basic has also lost two places, making room for R and SQL in the Top 10'; 'Assembly has re-entered the Top 20'; the methodology text 'based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors' and 'not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written'. Table: Python 1 (20.86%), C 2 (11.48%), Java 3 (8.89%), C++ 4 (8.35%), R 7 (2.27%), SQL 8 (1.91%), Visual Basic 9 (1.88%), Go 10 (1.69%), Rust 11 (1.63%), Assembly language 17 (0.92%), Dart 20 (0.74%, Nov 2025 position 26). All match the article. The page names no Dart ranking before this month, and nothing else on the page addresses the 2014 reports, so 'the November page does not address the 2014 reports' holds. source-1 (Slashdot, story posted Sunday October 18, 2026 by EditorDavid, 'TechRepublic reports:' block): CONFIRMED verbatim 'Dart jumps from #41 to #27 this month', 'Rust holds its No. 10 position', 'Go, which fell from #8 in October of 2025 to #11', 'followed by C, C++, Java, C#, and JavaScript', and 'TIOBE introduces Mandarin Chinese search terms into its methodology to broaden the index's geographic representation' (the article quotes only the first part, ending at 'methodology', which is verbatim). The same sentences were re-checked in the live page. Attribution to Slashdot quoting a TechRepublic report is correct; TechRepublic itself was not read (403 to the writer). source-2 (InfoWorld, Oct 6, 2014): CONFIRMED 'finally cracking its top 20 list, ranking 17th with a rating of 1.119 percent' and the index 'gauges language popularity through a formula that assesses searches on sites like Google, Yahoo, and YouTube'; 'which was ranked 81st in the index a year ago'; Tiobe Managing Director Paul Jansen said in an email the ranking of Dart, like Swift, 'will be quite volatile for a while' but he expects it to stay in the top 20. It is the TIOBE index, not RedMonk: InfoWorld cites a separate RedMonk ranking from spring 2014 in which Dart 'had stalled', and the article does not use it. source-3 (SD Times, Published October 7th, 2014): CONFIRMED 'Dart ranks at 17 out of the top 20 programming languages, up 64 positions from last year's previous rank of 81' and 'according to this month's TIOBE Index'. Both 2014 reports therefore say 17th in the TIOBE index in October 2014 (InfoWorld dated October 6, SD Times October 7), as the article states. Derived comparisons checked: Dart No. 27 (Slashdot/TechRepublic, October) to No. 20 (TIOBE, November) is correct; Rust No. 10 and Go No. 11 in October versus Go No. 10 and Rust No. 11 in November is a genuine swap and is labelled 'Taken together'; Java and C++ swapped places (October order C, C++, Java, November Java 3, C++ 4) is the Herald's own inference from the ordering in Slashdot's sentence, labelled 'by the Herald's comparison'. Internal links: /article/2026-07/14-tiobe-index-july-2026-rust-enters-the-top-10-... (Rust entering the top 10 for the first time in July 2026, correct) and /article/2026-09/01-tiobe-index-august-2026-matlab-exits-the-top-20-... (Rust holds No. 10, correct) both resolve to published articles and are described accurately. Allowlist: tiobe.com, infoworld.com and sdtimes.com are allowlisted; developers.slashdot.org was not, and was added after independent confirmation (live fetch HTTP 200, section index title 'Developers News | Slashdot', Slashdot Media copyright line, and slashdot.org/news.slashdot.org/games.slashdot.org already allowlisted). Independent-source recount (News, so the 2-independent Analysis rule does not apply): 3 of 4 sources are independent of TIOBE as outlets (Slashdot relaying TechRepublic, InfoWorld, SD Times); 1 is the subject's own page. Caveat: Slashdot is a secondary relay and the 2014 pieces concern the 2014 index, so every figure about the 2026 rankings other than the October ones rests on TIOBE itself, which the article attributes throughout.

No fabricated or misattributed specific found. Every direct quote is verbatim from the cited snapshot, every number and date traces to a snapshot, and the headline, summary and lead are each supported (TIOBE's first-time claim, the 2014 InfoWorld and SD Times No. 17 reports, Go passing Rust). The derived comparisons are labelled as the Herald's own. Sentence-level nuance: 'quite volatile for a while' is InfoWorld's indirect-speech rendering of Jansen's email, not a direct Jansen quote; the article places it in quotation marks as InfoWorld's wording within a sentence attributed to InfoWorld, which is acceptable. The remark that InfoWorld described the 2014 index through search sites while TIOBE's current page describes engineers, courses and vendors compares two different authors' descriptions and is hedged ('The sources do not say whether this difference ... accounts for the discrepancy'); it is not presented as an explanation. The 'both/every/each/all' scan found only 'None of the sources reviewed reconciles the two accounts', which is accurate. 'this month' appears only inside verbatim quotes; the article uses named months and dates.

Accurate, carefully attributed ranking story that handles an apparent contradiction between TIOBE's claim and 2014 reports without taking sides. Ready for publication as-is. Featured candidacy: 1 - solid, well-sourced language-ranking coverage for a defined developer audience (Dart's first top-20 claim and Go passing Rust), not an industry-changing story