If it is used at school, and by kids at home (because the Turbo is FREE)…

If it has a serious and FREE training package supported by an online help service…

If it is used by Students at college (because the Turbo is FREE)…

If How To articles and projects are sponsored by its producers and posted regularly with full support…

Then that language has a future, because it has new blood feeding into the roots of its structure.

As soon as you cut off that supply of new blood or fail to support and nurture it, then that language is starting to die.

Using the gardening analogy, the plant my be a wonderful variety, but without you regularly plant new seed and fertilise the environment, then eventually the old plants cease to be productive and die, and along with then, the variety dies.

The investment into new ‘roots and shoots’ has been absent for a long time now and Delphi is starting to die, being milked for its final yield before it finally gives up the ghost.

If Emberdoodar, want Delphi to blossom again then they have to do some serious investment in promoting free Turbo’s and Training Aids.

However, I have always felt that Delphi as a language and community are not very good at their own PR. Interesting things that bring it to the front of general programming sites make for good link bait and bring it to the attention of Developers who haven’t otherwise considered it. How do you feel about how/why we aren’t really involved in such activities?

@PRice – It would be nice to get Delphi into the attention of Developers who don’t currently use it. That’s why we would bother with other sites (particularly general news sites, as opposed to discussion sites).

@David W – Thank-you for your work on LangPop.com and thanks coming over to clarify for me. I can only imagine the types of bile filled emails you must get from various communities and can only hope that you receive none from the Delphi community. I wanted to make it very clear that Langpop is still interesting to us as long as you don’t take it personally as a Popularity contest.

Thanks for clarifying over the Normalised Discussion Index, I hadn’t appreciated that it was an indicies of the above results, apologies for the mistaken inflection.

It’s great that you’ve been as transparent about each of the findings as possible because it allows people to analyse them in their own context and establish exactly which areas are a weak point for a language and why that might be. I imagine that the Marketing people at Embarcadero who bought Codegear and Delphi from Borland will be interested in seeing these results as a way of highlighting what areas they can do more in.

> don’t mention which discussion sites they monitor

The sites listed there! Slashdot, reddit, Lambda the Ultimate, and IRC. I’m fairly big on transparency for langpop, as it makes it easier for people to think about the results – for instance, as you note with Delphi, it’s likely going to be underrepresented on Linux-y type sites like Freshmeat. I’d rather state that openly and let people draw their own conclusions.

By the way, if you have any suggestions for improvements, we have a mailing list for questions/comments/etc…, it’s linked on the site.

Thanks,
Dave

Id like to see a real break down!