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Delphi could be 2008 Language of the Year

So I have been emailing with Paul Jansen of TIOBE about the Community Programming Index.  He has added Delphi for .NET as part of the grouping for Delphi, but is not adding Lazarus because it is the IDE not the language.  I also told him I was working with the community to make sure we refer to Delphi as “Delphi Programming” and he sent me the following email:

Hi Jim,

Thanks. For your information, I think your action has already some effect. Tonight’s run shows that Delphi is #8 at this moment. There is a realistic chance that Delphi will become “TIOBE’s Language of the Year 2008”. This will be announced the 1st of January 2009.

Regards,

Paul

--
Paul Jansen - TIOBE Software, http://www.tiobe.com
De Zaale 11 Postbus 80 5600 AB Eindhoven, the Netherlands
Phone: +31 40 239 0870 Mobile: +31 617 400 620
*** TIOBE Software - The Coding Standards Company ***

When I asked him to be sure it was ok to share this information he said it was, but that I was clear that it is provisional as there may be other movement that happens before the end of the month that could change its position. I am hopping we just go straight to #7.  It is a very exciting possibility, and great to know that our efforts are paying off already.

Additionally, Neil Moffatt of DelphiBasics.co.uk has updated most every page there to say Delphi Programming and I am working with the Sysops for the Delphi Wiki to get it updated to the Delphi Programming Wiki. The comments on my last couple posts show that a lot of other people are updating their blogs and sites as well.  Keep in mind, as Dr. Bob pointed out, it might take a bit before Google indexes your site again (might be worth setting up a Google site map if you haven’t already) the sooner you update the better!

Where else can we encourage to update to Delphi Programming?  If you have been meaning to start a Delphi Blog now is the time!  Not only do we stand to pass C#, but we could be Language of the Year!

11 replies on “Delphi could be 2008 Language of the Year”

Good Job Jim in herding the community into small, simple steps that make it more visible to the outside world! Great campaigning!

You get Delphi declared language of the year and I will eat my words from the other day. The publicity that would generate would definitely be worthwhile even if the metric used to measure it is flawed and easily manipulated.

I would expect a quick retaliation from the other languages though. 😉

> but is not adding Lazarus because it is the IDE not the language.

I don’t get this? Lazarus and Free Pascal certain qualify for Delphi. Lazarus is not a pure IDE, it is a full RAD, and comes with the compiler prepackaged.

The differences between Delphi and Free Pascal/Lazarus in language are smaller than the difference within various Delphi versions.

You should ask them to group “Pascal Programming” together with “Delphi Programming”. I see them as separate langauges in the listings even though the details about how they rank indicate they should be grouped together. In other words, they do not seem to be following their own methodology.

On second thought, forget grouping Pascal with Delphi. Further examination of the methodology shows that they are not summing the groupings to get a collective rating but taking the maximum value of any item in the group. So they are more interested in peak ratings than overall usage or coverage. Therefore, it matters not if the groupings are accurate.

Clearly the methodology is questionable as to its usefulness.

If you are a beginner you’ll get Lazarus (mostly). If you are more experienced you’ll checkout FreePascal. I don’t see Lazarus as an IDE only! You download it, write code, compile and run your programm. That’s for me Rapid Application Development : RAD. Am I wrong?

I’ll email them about Lazarus again, although as @Greymont pointed out, they only take the highest rated key phrase and use that. So combining Lazarus into the Delphi programming grouping is only an ideological point (not that there is anything wrong with that.)

Another major flaw with the TIOBE index that I haven’t seen addressed anywhere so far is that “XYZ programming” matches English language pages only… Given the often stated fact that Delphi is more successful outside the US this is bound to skew the stats even more, isn’t it. Agreed, not more than it skews the other (programming) languages but still… (and most of those are not said to be more popular outside the US)

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