Someone on Twitter recently pointed me to LangPop.com – which claims to gather together data to give you an estimated rating of how popular certain Programming languages are. I know that most people have seen the TIOBE Programming Community index at some point which uses similar data mining methods to LangPop. This is the first chart which uses a similar data method to the TIOBE index which uses a very broad search engine ranking:

LangPop.com - Yahoo Search Results - Searches took the form "language programming"

What is different about LangPop, however, is the other graphs that it presents later on which searches different data sources and tries to present different angles of a particular programming language community. For those who like their summaries like an icicle, cold and to the point: Delphi doesn’t appear to pull the weight we owe it in certain areas.

What does this all mean?

Absolutely Nothing much but also something.

Absolutely Nothing Much?

This is not a popularity contest, nor should it be. Critics of the data sampling methods used in on LangPop and the TIOBE index can argue that they are inaccurate, flawed, biased and any number of other ways of describing why the data should not be relied upon. In the end, the business case for the language used in your projects can only be considered by you based on a huge number of project specific factors and whilst this chart can hint at an economic condition it can also be argued to be a fairly superficial reason amongst others. These charts didn’t change the way I saw any one particular language.

But also something?

What interested me about this particular page wasn’t where Delphi was ranked in comparison to other languages but where it ranked in comparison to itself when compared to the other sources of data. By looking at Data sources where Delphi programming has slid a long way down or up when compared with the nominal position that both TIOBE and the initial chart on LangPop.com (Roughly 11th) we can see where the Delphi is lacking in the eyes of an outsider who has no experience with the Delphi community.

This means that we can effectively see in what areas Delphi maintains a low profile (and can be improved). These are the areas where maybe with some improvement we could begin to lure new programmers, fresh blood and begin to change the perception of Delphi. Lets look at the other data sources presented in these charts:

Craigslist: Used to search for job availability specifying a certain language. Arguments aside over Craigslist not being representative of the job market. At least it’s occasionally used to post some seriously funny job listings. Delphi produces a disappointing score on this test and slips below Assembly, Shell Scripting and Cobol. There must be better data on the number of Delphi jobs out there so I’m not too focussed on this.

Slips -7 places.

Amazon: Used to assess the number of books written about a particular language. Delphi appears to have relatively few books, especially when compared to languages that are both younger and older, languages that jump up the list here include Fortran, Cobol and Ada. As anecdotal backup for this: the number of Delphi books released each year in the past 10 years seems to be in decline.

Slips -7 places.

Google Code & Freshmeat: Used to assess the volume of Open Source projects created with a language. Before this I had a mis-guided impression that there was a relatively small number open source projects using Delphi but on Google Code Delphi actually holds it’s own nicely. I attribute the slip in its form on the Freshmeat comparison because Freshmeat declares itself to be an index of Unix and cross-platform software (which Delphi isn’t really cut out for just yet – but will be).

Equal & Slips -7 places respectively.

Del.icio.us: Gives us an indicator of what programmers are bookmarking and therefore indicates a rough measure of how interesting and “desirable” a language is. This is where the table of results differed most from the index TIOBE results. Delphi programmers are clearly not adopting social-bookmarking tools because this is we see that the number of Delphi bookmarks is disappointingly low (I’m doing my part, fwiw). You can’t read too much into this measurement except that it also indicates that not many people outside the Delphi community bookmark & tag delphi links (whereas many up and coming languages are researched by people wanting to learn it).

Slips 10 places.

Ohloh: Olhloh provides information and statistics about various open source projects and the developers that contribute to them. On Ohloh Delphi appears to be underrepresented and it is here that Olhloh actually measures more registered developers contributing to Pascal Projects (such as Lazarus and fpc) than Delphi developers. This doesn’t necessarily mean that there are more pure Pascal developers than Delphi developers but that there are more Pascal developers contributing to large open source projects.

Slips 7 places.

There are also other measurements such as the number of times it is mentioned on programming.reddit.com and Slashdot where it represents almost a zero presence in the selection of languages that they’ve chosen to sample.

LangPop.com - programming.reddit.com Results

This might be linked to the same reason why it doesn’t rank highly in the del.icio.us index either. Delphi also appears to be under represented in the FreeNode IRC network chart as well being pitifully under represented in the “Normalized Discussion Site” results (although it’s interesting to note that they don’t mention which discussion sites they monitor). IRC use in general could be considered to have experienced better days but I have spent a lot of time helping in the #delphi room of a  Top 5 IRC network and would always love to see more people sharing and helping others.

[Updated 9th July: Dave Welton from LangPop.com has since notified me in a comment below that the Normalised Discussion Site results are a combination of the section with  programming.reddit.com and slashdot etc. My fault!]

Should we be concerned?

No. There are good reasons why some of these measurements do not accurately represent the picture that they claim to portray. It does give us food for thought because this represents how outsiders see the Delphi community and the Delphi Language as a whole. It is interesting though, why do we have an apparent shortage of Delphi Programming books being published? Although some authors are still producing excellent books (such as the Delphi 2009 HandBook by Marco Cantu which you can currently get for free if you buy or try Delphi 2009) there does appear to be a very small number published in the last few years. I’m not sure why this is, I’ve always thought that there is certainly room for a several books on Delphi 2009, Delphi Prism and I personally would like to see a book solely on recipes for Delphi Prism Cirrus Aspects.

What of the open source projects? As a commercial tool Delphi isn’t a terribly good offering for open source projects at present which might explain why it doesn’t feature that strongly in Open source offerings. I’ve long campaigned for a renewed focus on the Turbo Delphi‘s or Delphi Personal editions for exactly this reason.

I did find it interesting that as a community we seem to be quite bad at making “noise” in bookmarking sites, programming news sites and discussion boards leading those outside the community to believe that Delphi Developers are fewer in numbers than they actually are. Some may scorn these as useless activities however I do feel that general publicity, interesting news, projects and cool links do have a huge impact on how outsiders view a language community. I do also feel that the planned releases of Delphi containing Cross platform Delphi and 64 Bit Delphi will pull Delphi back up on these metrics as it begins to be used in new and interesting ways.  I’m not sure if it’s just me but I have noticed a renewed vigour in the Delphi community of late.

What now?

Personally, I feel that the Delphi Community is beginning the fight back, with more high profile projects, more unusual projects and fresh users are increasingly making the case for Delphi (and we’re also seeing some great evangelism posts from within the community, not to mention great new initiatives like Delphi Podcasts). The kind of community growth that will highlight delphi to an outsider can only be built organically with hard work and we can take small steps to begin on that path. Delphi itself is also in great hands, it seems to me to be going from strength to strength since CodeGear splitting away from a certain troubled parent company that rhymes with Morland. Think about this: In the last 12 months we’ve seen significantly revived confidence in the community, A superb .NET offering with Delphi Prism and news of a renewed attack force with Cross Platform Delphi and 64-Bit Delphi applications for extra-strength apps.

What do you think of my reaction to these graphs? What other ways can we, the community, evangelise Delphi and change an unfamiliar programmers perspective of Delphi and the Delphi Community? What makes you excited about a particular language? (in both a professional and a personal setting)

And to pre-empt the inevitable naysayers out there: Delphi is neither dead nor dying.