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Author Topic: TIOBE Programming Index merges Object Pascal and Delphi!  (Read 21098 times)

Leledumbo

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Re: TIOBE Programming Index merges Object Pascal and Delphi!
« Reply #45 on: June 22, 2020, 10:58:26 am »
Why someone still cares about this rating? It's obviously crappy. And doesn't show something real nor for Pascal nor for other languages. Just forget about it. ;)
The shitty fact is, it's often referenced elsewhere, including "scientific" research.

simone

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Re: TIOBE Programming Index merges Object Pascal and Delphi!
« Reply #46 on: June 22, 2020, 11:18:20 am »
I have written several emails to the CEO of Tiobe, reporting the inconsistencies of his methodology. He himself recognized his limitations.

No person with a minimum of knowledge of the subject can believe that this metric has a scientific value and measures the real popularity of a programming language.

The problem (not negligible however), is the impact on the image. However, I note that other metrics treat our beloved language even worse. For example in PYPL it is #28.

We must not be discouraged and engage more and more in the advocacy of language in every possible context, as many of you already do.
« Last Edit: June 22, 2020, 11:27:24 pm by simone »
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Blade

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Re: TIOBE Programming Index merges Object Pascal and Delphi!
« Reply #47 on: June 23, 2020, 11:48:03 pm »
I have also written TIOBE about what they are doing.  They appear to be applying a different standard to the Pascal programming language, where they incorrectly divide the language by different compilers and IDEs, versus viewing it as a whole.  The impression that I was given is that they have internal biases within the company, very strong personal opinions, and a business agenda that affects the outcome of their index.  Unfortunately, they are somehow in the position to affect and shape public opinion.

I do think the Object Pascal community should continue the attempt to inform and enlighten them, to make it clear we are aware of what they are doing and that they should treat our programming language fairly, and under the same standards that they use for the other languages at the top of their list.  Our public advocacy will at least serve as a counter-balance to what they are doing.
« Last Edit: June 23, 2020, 11:54:32 pm by Blade »

Warfley

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Re: TIOBE Programming Index merges Object Pascal and Delphi!
« Reply #48 on: June 27, 2020, 12:36:03 pm »
I honestly think it's highly unlikely that the people behind the TIOBE index, who rank multiple hundred of languages have a specific bias against one small language (which currently is also rather unimportant, compared to the top languages).

I think this is just because of their flawed methodology. As they stated on their website, they merged Delphi and ObjectPascal again because the wikipedia entry for Delphi changed (somewhen in april).
Even if the guideline to base this all on the exact wording in wikipedia articles is stupid (which I personally do), they seem to follow it rather strictly

PS: if you want pascal to rise in the TIOBE index we should just rename lazarus to "Object Pascal Programming Environment" and every google search after it would increase the tiobe counter
« Last Edit: June 27, 2020, 12:39:27 pm by Warfley »

Ñuño_Martínez

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Re: TIOBE Programming Index merges Object Pascal and Delphi!
« Reply #49 on: July 02, 2020, 11:56:04 am »
Why someone still cares about this rating? It's obviously crappy. And doesn't show something real nor for Pascal nor for other languages. Just forget about it. ;)
Marketing.

Maybe you don't like it (I don't like it) but a lot of people still use TIOBE to decide the language to use instead of actual research about efficiency, costs, support, etc.  It's sad but it is the world we live in.  :(
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440bx

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Re: TIOBE Programming Index merges Object Pascal and Delphi!
« Reply #50 on: July 02, 2020, 12:25:51 pm »
a lot of people still use TIOBE to decide the language to use
Proof that there is something to the phrase "there's a sucker born every minute".  There is probably some truth to the Brooklyn bridge having been sold twice a week at a point in time.  The buyer's descendants are probably among the TIOBE "believers". :)
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jamie

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Re: TIOBE Programming Index merges Object Pascal and Delphi!
« Reply #51 on: July 02, 2020, 12:40:36 pm »
a lot of people still use TIOBE to decide the language to use
Proof that there is something to the phrase "there's a sucker born every minute".  There is probably some truth to the Brooklyn bridge having been sold twice a week at a point in time.  The buyer's descendants are probably among the TIOBE "believers". :)

Ah the Brooklyn Bridge. I had a copy of that software years ago for the DOS PC via the serial port, modem to remote link to other  PCs it was very useful back in the days when I was doing POS software.

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AlexTP

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Re: TIOBE Programming Index merges Object Pascal and Delphi!
« Reply #52 on: July 07, 2020, 10:47:08 pm »
I got a email reply from TIOBE.
Seems they "play correctly" -

Quote
1. We only accept terms that are referred to as programming languages according to Wikipedia (see our definition page). So Visual C++, GNU C++ etc are not on our radar because these are referred to as IDE and compiler respectively.

2. The Delphi community caused all this confusion themselves. First they separated Object Pascal and Delphi in Wikipedia (thus creating two entries in the TIOBE index), then somebody referred to Delphi as an IDE (thus removing Delphi all together from the TIOBE index) and then they tried to save the situation by calling Delphi a programming language again and stating in the Delphi article that it is the same as Object Pascal. Please check the history of the Delphi and Object Pascal Wikipedia pages and you will see that they have been messing around and restore things to make sure the Delphi/Object Pascal ratings are not going down.

So all in all. We just stick to our definition without any discrimination and the weird Delphi/Object Pascal things that are going on in TIOBE index are caused by the Delphi community themselves. If you want to get back in the front seat with Delphi I strongly recommend to improve your tools instead of changing Wikipedia pages all the time. I hope that this answers your question.

Regards,

Paul

--
Paul Jansen - TIOBE Software

It is not private info so I put it here


440bx

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Re: TIOBE Programming Index merges Object Pascal and Delphi!
« Reply #53 on: July 08, 2020, 03:40:56 am »
Quote
2. The Delphi community caused all this confusion themselves.
They have a point there and, it isn't just the Delphi community that caused the confusion. Borland and its descendants  made significant contributions to it by trying to distance themselves from Pascal as a language and when, for instance, they claimed that Delphi was written in Delphi.  Just for the record, the Pascal compiler used in Delphi is written in C not Pascal.  Unlike FPC, Delphi (if there is such a language) isn't self hosting.

Delphi is just a development environment on top of a Pascal dialect but, that does not seem to be good enough for some people.  IOW, Delphi is a programming language as Lazarus is a programming language (fortunately, the Lazarus community seems to know better than to attempt to pass it as one.)


Sadly, Pascal's glory days are in the rear view mirror and, unless a miracle happens, the best that can be expected is for it to remain there instead of simply disappearing in the distance.
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Blade

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Re: TIOBE Programming Index merges Object Pascal and Delphi!
« Reply #54 on: July 08, 2020, 10:30:21 am »
Sadly, Pascal's glory days are in the rear view mirror and, unless a miracle happens, the best that can be expected is for it to remain there instead of simply disappearing in the distance.

I think Object Pascal still has a very significant future, because it still has some very nice features and tools in comparison to other languages.  As a language, debatably it can go toe to toe with C#, C++, Java, or Python.  Yes, there are advantages and disadvantages to each language, but I'm speaking in general terms and usage.  And there is a surprising amount of information about how to do things or learning resources out there for Object Pascal, if the person applies correct search term combinations, because of so many different brand labels.  Which kind of shows how powerful and mature the language is.  You can use many different IDEs and dialects to do a much more wide range of things.

Probably among the biggest issue in terms of public awareness is labeling, which companies using dialects of Object Pascal seem to purposely muddy the water.  Just as much, advocates of competing languages want to say "this dead" or "that dead", so people think their favorite language is the only choice.  Many will think that Oxygene or Delphi are their own languages, because of the sales pitch.  If you talk about Pascal, often the mental link goes directly to Turbo Pascal.  Say Object Pascal, you might get blank stares for a second, but then say Delphi and then, "Oh yeah, I heard about that."  You can't blame companies for pushing their products, but I guess something should be done to push the name of the programming language that they are using (Object Pascal) more into the forefront. 

440bx

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Re: TIOBE Programming Index merges Object Pascal and Delphi!
« Reply #55 on: July 08, 2020, 11:24:43 am »
I think Object Pascal still has a very significant future,
I hope you are right but, the current trend doesn't lead there.

Pascal's mindshare isn't growing and, quite a few Pascal programmers are life long programmers who are _not_ being replaced by a new generation. 
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devEric69

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Re: TIOBE Programming Index merges Object Pascal and Delphi!
« Reply #56 on: July 08, 2020, 12:20:21 pm »
Quote
PS: if you want pascal to rise in the TIOBE index we should just rename lazarus to "Object Pascal Programming Environment" and every google search after it would increase the tiobe counter.

Done.
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howardpc

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Re: TIOBE Programming Index merges Object Pascal and Delphi!
« Reply #57 on: July 08, 2020, 05:00:41 pm »
PS: if you want pascal to rise in the TIOBE index we should just rename lazarus to "Object Pascal Programming Environment" and every google search after it would increase the tiobe counter
Lazarus does not need renaming.
Even if it did, to try to rename it because it might inflate some here-today, gone-tomorrow third party statistic would be about the most ridiculous motive for giving it a new name I can imagine.
Pascal, FPC and Lazarus are not super-popular compared with many other programming languages and IDEs. This is true, and no one can disagree. It may always be true (though we don't know the future until it arrives, so it might not always be true, though personally I doubt it will ever be super-popular).

Democracy works by elevating the most popular choice. Sometimes it turns out well. Often it does not, or the USA would have a different (most likely better) president than the current, once-most-popular, choice; and the UK would not be leaving the EU.
TIOBE merely reflects a fairly crude comparative assessment of the popularity of different languages. While one can pick holes in their methodology, and see shortcomings in the yardsticks they use to produce their statistics, it is not so far from reflecting current developers' preferences that it is useless or worthless. Pascal, by whatever measure, does not fare well. So what?
« Last Edit: July 08, 2020, 05:05:09 pm by howardpc »

Warfley

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Re: TIOBE Programming Index merges Object Pascal and Delphi!
« Reply #58 on: July 08, 2020, 06:31:19 pm »
Lazarus does not need renaming.
Even if it did, to try to rename it because it might inflate some here-today, gone-tomorrow third party statistic would be about the most ridiculous motive for giving it a new name I can imagine.
Pascal, FPC and Lazarus are not super-popular compared with many other programming languages and IDEs. This is true, and no one can disagree. It may always be true (though we don't know the future until it arrives, so it might not always be true, though personally I doubt it will ever be super-popular).

Democracy works by elevating the most popular choice. Sometimes it turns out well. Often it does not, or the USA would have a different (most likely better) president than the current, once-most-popular, choice; and the UK would not be leaving the EU.
TIOBE merely reflects a fairly crude comparative assessment of the popularity of different languages. While one can pick holes in their methodology, and see shortcomings in the yardsticks they use to produce their statistics, it is not so far from reflecting current developers' preferences that it is useless or worthless. Pascal, by whatever measure, does not fare well. So what?
This was a joke because it seems like a lot of people here seem very concerned with the perception on the popularity of Pascal.
Actually Pascal comes of pretty good in the tiobe index, if you take another metric like share of projects on github, Pascal lands somewhere in the lower half, while on tiobe it's somewhere on place 2x or so (didn't bother to look up).

Pascal is not very popular right now, which I think can be blamed on many things, to  name the two most important ones in my Oppinion:
1. the poor marketing choices of borland and co, who guarded the most well known compiler for this language behind a few kilo€ paywall, and only recently added a "community edition" (even though they seem to not know what this term actually means)  which is much much worse than comparable community editions like Visual Studio or the JetBrains products.
Lazarus while having some popularity now, was back when I started using Delphi (about 10-12 years ago) pretty buggy and also not really well known. If Embarcadero would have put out an "Community Edition" (back then they would have probably named it free edition or so) of XE in 2010 I bet the situation would be totally different.
2. .Not took the Niche on windows. The big thing about Delphi was Rapid GUI development, which suddenly was much easier with .Not If I compare Delphi XE with VS 2008, VS is better in nearly any regard, it was faster, had more features and most importantly didn't crash every 10 minutes (honestly I only tried the test version for 14 days of XE and have stopped using it because it was unusable).

I mean if I look to today, languages like C#, Java are making a lot of things much easier than in Pascal, tooling for such languages (especially java) is much better, and in the bare metal programming niche, C, C++ and Rust are much better because they are tuned for such things.

I use Lazarus most importantly because I really like the language and it's open source (and I really like these oldschool bare metal programming, being able to test and use all the quirks of the underlying architecture just makes me happy, things you simply can't do in java or so). But if someone just wants to learn a language to get things done, I would most probably recommend Java, C# or some other language, because in the end, they make life much easier in many regards. (But I would recommend it for example to someone who wants to learn how to program out of interest to learn how computers and programming works, I think here pascal is really great)
« Last Edit: July 08, 2020, 06:34:00 pm by Warfley »

julkas

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Re: TIOBE Programming Index merges Object Pascal and Delphi!
« Reply #59 on: July 08, 2020, 07:51:29 pm »
Democracy works by elevating the most popular choice. Sometimes it turns out well. Often it does not, or the USA would have a different (most likely better) president than the current, once-most-popular, choice; and the UK would not be leaving the EU.
First of all give us your definition of democracy, please.
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