Reply to post: Re: Show's Delphi's worth!

Re: Show's Delphi's worth!

The funny thing is that on the official forum they ridiculed TIOBE... until it started to turn in their favor. :-)

TIOBE is a "lagging indicator". Part of its rating process includes the total number of pages about a language. The problem is, those pages might be ancient pages that haven't had a hit in 10 years. As such, it is slow to reflect recent trends and tools like Visual Basic end up higher on TIOBE than on more leading indicators, such as using Google Trends to see what languages people are actually searching for (as used in the PYPL index).

There's no reason that Delphi users can't open source their code - heck, the Mormot framework, Omnithread Library, Spring4J, DWScript, etc. are very successful Delphi open source libraries. The *culture* hasn't changed since the 1990s though - most Delphi users write a library and then try to sell it online for $60-$300. Delphi is the only language I can think of where users *pay* for database drivers, even for open source databases!

As for a reasonable and balanced view, I find the idea that Delphi is as widely used as Python to hardly be reasonable. Nick Hodges, former product manager, once wrote something to the effect of "Delphi may be as popular as C or C++ - we just don't know." David Heffernan, the man who answers almost EVERY Delphi question on Stack Overlfow, replied that someone would need to be delusional to believe that Delphi is as popular as C++. You can check job boards, Stack Overflow, message boards, repositories, etc. to gauge language popularity. Heck, Delphi hasn't had a commercial book published since 2005 (Mastering Delphi 2005). If Delphi was as popular as Python, why would no publisher publish a book on it? There have been a few dozen Python books published in 2015. In the entire United States, Dice.com turns up 67 (!!!) job hits, and that's without throwing out the ones for Delphi Auto Parts or the Delphi hotel management system. Python returns 6,452. Reddit has 696 subscribers to /r/Delphi and 112,555 for /r/Python! So no, I don't apologize for believing that a Delphi user claiming that Delphi is as popular as Python makes the Delphi community look silly.

"One of Delphi's problems is the internet community of people who seem viciously against it, posting at every opportunity that it is bad, unused, etc. "

No, one of Delphi's problems is that so many of its remaining users can only program in Delphi, have never used any other language, never talk to any non-Delphi programmers, and otherwise live in their own bubble that's trapped in the 1990s. Feeling persecuted and paranoid is another symptom. People aren't "viciously against it"; most of the world forgot it existed. The others are just trying to inject a dose of reality to those who believe everything is rosy when the language has sunk to extreme niche status and has been overpriced and mismanaged for quite some time. The "interested critics" are Delphi users who have been burned by putting all their eggs into one basket. Criticizing the language is the most useful thing any Delphi user can do right now. We can't fix things until we agree on what's wrong. No other language community forbids people from discussing its flaws or only wants to hear praise. And if our community thinks it's as popular as Python then it doesn't have a clue about where it needs to improve.

"As for Google, Facebook etc: I have no idea if those companies use it."

They talk about the tools they use all the time - they even create some of their own! You have to know that they don't use Delphi. A multinational using a language for an internal infrastructure project is considered one of the metrics that a new language has succeeded. I don't believe Delphi ever achieved that point.

>I also know, from personal knowledge, that Delphi is used by several space institutes

That it was used for one project in the 1990s by NASA doesn't count. When you limit things to 2010 onwards, it becomes a very different picture. Much of what's present on "made with Delphi" lists becomes disqualified as a result.

> by many scientific software companies doing things you may not have heard of but with core, high->tech customers, etc. (I know because I've worked on several of those software products.)

Given that R and Python dominate the scientific computing field right now, I'd be very interested in what scientific software today is based on Delphi. Heck, the array/statistics/machine learning libraries from Dew Research alone cost a combined $1600.