Я даже не смотрю эти рейтинги. Они что-то поменяют для меня? Для тех кто пользуется паскалем?
google translate: I don't even look at these ratings. Will they change something for me? For those who use pascal?
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Warfley, я думаю вам не надо всё оценивать по общим статистикам. Сообщество Паскаля развивается. Люди об этом знают, и в наших силах чтоб об этом узнало больше людей!
google translate: I think you don't need to judge everything by general statistics. Pascal's community is evolving. People know about it, and it is in our power to make more people know about it!
Well, when I start a new project, the question which language and environment to use is always one of the first questions I ask myself, and as such I need to compare the languages on, at least mostly, objective measures, and such statistics can be very useful there.
Let me give you three examples for projects where the popularity matters. Let's consider the following, a chat using state of the art encryption techniques. So as a developer I can't be knowledgable on everything, so I rely on the works of others in form of libraries. This is especially true for crypto. There are so many forms of different attack techniques, and if your application is not hardened against them, you could simply not use crypto at all. So crypto libraries are a key, they should be well tested and maintained. So what are the options for doing crypto with Pascal (FPC+Lazarus in particular), well there is only one "big" crypto library for Pascal, DCPCrypt. It is/was maintained by a single guy (according to commit history) and the last updates were commited in 2014, which where only formating and cvs specific updates. The last real code updates came 2009, 12 years ago. It is also had only 61 downloads last week.
I mean I love pascal, but I would never use a library for security critical issues that hasn't been updated in more than a decade. There is no such thing as bug free software, and if a software that hasn't had any bugs fixed for a long time, this either means a lack of testing, or a lack of development effort or both.
So looking around other languages, we see that for python there is the big library pycryptodome, which is continuation of pycrypto, which also exists at least since 2002, and still gets bugs reported and fixed to this day (the last major version was released in feb). So if I am going to make something using cryptography, I would pretty much always choose python over pascal.
Besides technical issues with a community that small, there are also accessibility issues, especially if you do a lot of open source development. Let's consider the following, you write an application for a specific topic, something you are really into, like a tracker for sport games or something like that, basically for some kind of community (doesn't even need to be large, you might want to simply write a gag program for your friends or colleagues). You want to share that program with the community, so you make it open source. If your program is well liked it might get picked up by others from the community and continue with the project or build new things around your core, thats the beauty of open source. The thing is to make that happen your code must be accessible to others.
I like pascal, and if I thought it is a dead language, I wouldn't waste my time using it. I write and publish libraries for fpc and lazarus because I think it is worth while to extend the infrastructure available. The thing is, if I write code I want to share with others, people I know are not interested or able (e.g. due to a lack of time) to learn pascal, I bascially already burried my code before writing it, simply by choosing an unpopular language.
Of course what is "popular" depends on the community in question, if you write a simple gag program for your colleagues at an office where you only use C++, this might be the popular choice, in the same context that C++ code wouldn't be the best choice for something targetet to the users of this forum. The thing is, if you are targeting an open source audience, if you want your code to thrive, popularity is key.
Lastly there is also the issue of response time. If you find a bug withing a largly popular project like the gcc or .Net and you report it, it is often fixed within days, and shipped with hotfixes immediately (if it is a severe bug that is). I know I've written about this now pretty often, but it fits here well. I came into the situation (more then once), that I discovered a breaking bug in the FPC, breaking in the sense that there was no working around this in my project, without starting from the beginning redesigning the whole structure of the program. The fpc has a small development team, which has to ration their time, and can't fix every bug. So this is not to blame anyone, I can completely understand this, but as a result I had to abandon whole projects and throw weeks of work away. I mean these were fun projects, so it's not that big a deal, but this is something that literally has never happend to me with any of the popular languages, because there is much more testing and manpower behind it.
It should be noted that FPC does not have any hotfixes or so, bugfixes are always shipped with the next version, meaning even if your bug is fixed, unless you want to work on unstable/development code, or apply patches yourself, you probably won't see that fix for months.
Popularity, or better lack there of, can have a lot of impact on the whole software development process, it might make a software unfeasable due to lack of libraries and support infrastructure even before the a single line of code was already written, it might render your code dead on arrival as no one is willing or able to engage with that code, or it can mean that all of your efforts come to a halt because you stumble upon an issue you can't solve on your own, and the support community is simply not large enough to handle each issue, and your problem isn't top of the priority list.
And again, I love pascal, but when I decide to make a new project and consider all the programming languages out there, popularity is a factor to consider. Of course not the only one, and by far not the most important one, but it can't be dismissed