The Ranking of Free Pascal in the Tiobe-indexl

[Webdrifter]

May we can make our forum and wiki's more friendly for use with mobile devices? Since youngsters seem to work with these more and more! Thus creating more traffic and attention. And thus in the end maybe more influx of young people?

[Webdrifter]

Maybe some of the more knowledgeable people of our community could regularly write some articles on major forums where young programmers tend to go. On where Pascal and it's eco-system excels or could hand them tools that lack in other languages.

For instance I have always found that although Pascal does not excel on many field it tends to belong to the top contestors in many fields. Which in overview should maybe even label it as the best general programming language.

And I believe it's capability of supporting a great many of platforms is a huge salespitch for anybody interested in hypes like "the internet of things".

[Webdrifter]

I know my children hardly search in forums and wikis, if at all.

When they want to know something they search on Youtube first.

I can't even find our own Free pascal and Lazarus channels on there!

Even Delphi shines by absence.

So maybe we should be much more prominently active on those platforms......

(Together with links towards our promoting articles, forums and wiki's off course)

[marcov]

If we rename, the new name must be "Bamboo"

[dbannon]

If we rename, the new name must be "Bamboo"

OK, I'll bite, why bamboo ?

[marcov]

If we rename, the new name must be "Bamboo"

OK, I'll bite, why bamboo ?

Delphi once planned to rename its products, somewhere in the D2009-DXE period. One of the suggested alternatives in the survey was Bamboo.

I assume the idea was something like grows quickly and still a quite strong building material.

[Webdrifter]

If we rename, the new name must be "Bamboo"

OK, I'll bite, why bamboo ?

Delphi once planned to rename its products, somewhere in the D2009-DXE period. One of the suggested alternatives in the survey was Bamboo.

I assume the idea was something like grows quickly and still a quite strong building material.

Nice name, but will it help us up in the rankings......

[nospambox]

I have been programmer in Delphi / FPC since 1995. Private and corporate usage.
it is by far a very convenient eco system to make efficient programming, both at design but also at execution stages.

But why Delphi/FPC are so low in the ranking ? It is not "only" advertizing or the way the statistics are built. It is a problem of interoperability with some frameworks that are today a "must have" for a programmer.

Most libs, today, have moved from a former C implementation to a C++ implementation. In the old days, it was still acheivable to wrap the C library so it could be used with FPC/Delphi. It required some efforts, but community was taking care of that as well as some automation tools to convert H to PAS.

But with the move to C++, it is now nearly impossible to use the modern libs. Down the road, too many efforts to get it working (for wrapper developers) and very hard to use (for programmer).

So, all languages being able to inter operate with these frameworks are "winners". Of course, you have C++ native programming (not very friendly), ... but many others options (Python, ...). If you want neural network programming (Caffe, tensorflow), you need C++. You want vision system (OpenCV), you need C++. You want some "drivers" to operate prioprietary cards (like IO cards), you need C++.
Look at the top "libraries" that exist, what ever the purpose. In the most case, no option to run them from Delphi/FPC.

Only way in Pascal to use these is to incorporate a P4D layer and get a python layer programming inside Delphi/FPC. Crazy and a lot of limitations.

Down the road, if we want to increase ranking in reviews, we need to increase functionnalities so programmers get best of the world programming environment : ease at design time, error safe coding, fast to execute, muti tageting with cross compilation.... and able to connect to anything alreay existing. FPC/Delphi, covers very well the first points - probably best in class - but last point is becoming every day more and more a handicap that will kill this framework.

And I am very sad writting this.

[Webdrifter]

@nospambox - Seems like good points you make. Would like to hear the opinion about this from the Pascal die-hard's of this forum. In the meantime if nobody picks up this challenge all that rests us is trying to pull in some new blood by better marketing.

[marcov]

Nospambox:  I think the reasons are less technical, but not having a major company as backing (and no Embarcadero doesn't count).

[Webdrifter]

Nospambox:  I think the reasons are less technical, but not having a major company as backing (and no Embarcadero doesn't count).

Agree, but unless somebody knows how to land a company like that for the Pascal community, I guess that road is not worth our energy.

But maybe you have other suggestions that might cut it?

[marcov]

Nospambox:  I think the reasons are less technical, but not having a major company as backing (and no Embarcadero doesn't count).

Agree, but unless somebody knows how to land a company like that for the Pascal community, I guess that road is not worth our energy.

But maybe you have other suggestions that might cut it?

No, I think that World Dominations are the unicorn option, and choose to work mostly for actual users, not for potential users.

I don't mind doing a bit of publicity, but that should be about promoting what there is, not the shortest route to changing it.

[Bi0T1N]

There's the largely ineffective (imnsho) Free Pascal and Lazarus Foundation.

That's true. If you create a foundation you should a least maintain the website and your projects but that's obviously not the case (e.g. Attributes are implemented in mid 2019 or just look at the awkward RoadMap page). Each project page should also highlight the advantage(s) of having this feature and thus might increases the willingness of donations.

May we can make our forum and wiki's more friendly for use with mobile devices?

That's indeed needed. For the wiki I've already mentioned this here. Adding the wiki translation plug-in would also improve the overall user experience but seems the admin(s) don't care.
However, for the forum you've to wait for the final release of SMF 2.1 as this introduces a responsive design but as you can see it's still at RC2 after almost 6 years.

My recommendations for the above points:
The people behind the Foundation should think about moving to Github Pages so everyone could suggest changes by simple pull requests. The same applies to the development of FPC/Lazarus even if I know that some people don't like Github but it's the #1 like Google is for searching the web. If you want to attract new people go to the place where they are.
I mean, sure you can host your own Gitee/Gitlab instance but if the amount of volunteers is limited and the few don't even keep pace with updating/installing asked plug-ins or features why running another software?

[Handoko]

Maybe somebody knows a SEO specialist who is willing to look into the matter? And give us some tips...

I'm not a specialist but because I build websites for my clients, I ever spent some time learning SEO.

These are some mayor things that affect a website's SEO score:
- The domain name contains the targeted keywords
- The URL contains the targeted keywords
- Backlink from .edu, .org, .gov domains
- Do follow link from high rank and traffic sites (cnn.com, reddit.com, etc)
- High quality and unique contents
- Update regularly
- Not link to bad neighborhoods (p*rn, s*x, drug, etc)

Nowadays with the fast growing of social media, search engines also put some weight on the social media mentions.

I personally think Free Pascal does a good job in SEO. At least this forum is the first item if you search using the keyword "pascal forum" using DuckDuckGo. I don't think renaming Free Pascal is good. It may sounds nice in human ears but it will ruin the previous built SEO. It can regain the score but it needs time and lots of efforts.

I personally think if we want to improve the SEO we should put more efforts on social media like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter. Also update and improve the wiki. The wiki has too many outdated information, not good for for both human and search engines.

We could maybe put meta tags and standard sentences containing ALL the right combination of words on EVERY webpage we create, starting with the freepascal and lazarus website and our forums and personal blogs.

Meta tags are often abused and Google no longer values meta tags.
https://support.seomanager.com/article/30-keywords-meta-field-is-no-longer-used-by-google

May we can make our forum and wiki's more friendly for use with mobile devices?

When I'm not sitting in front of my computer, I often visit this forum using my mobile phone. It does not look good on my phone.

When they want to know something the search on Youtube first.

Yes YouTube. Youngsters like YouTube, not my favorite but I also spend some time watching it.

I am glad to see some nice users post their tutorials on YouTube but I wish to see more:
https://wiki.freepascal.org/Lazarus_videos

If we rename, the new name must be "Bamboo"

No, don't use the name. I own a Bamboo, it is a brand name of a discontinued model of Wacom tablet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wacom#Discontinued

[Webdrifter]

I don't see any point in discussing names that destroy our rating or the mental connection with "Pascal".

It should help us up in the rating and strengthen the mental connection with "Pascal". 

Otherwise we might just as well start all over again with a new language.