That’s a lot of downloads but I suspect some of the downloads are from people who aren’t pascal programmers that just want to collect/analyze the code for some reason.
That many people have that much time to spend analyzing tools they don't use?
If it was just for analysis purposes then using gitlab (and previously subversion) would have been the more likely place they would have downloaded from, and the numbers for those were not covered in the numbers given.
I wonder how many people are chatting in the forums on an average day.
Using forum participation or chat participation is also a very poor metric.
For users of any language or tool you are only going to get an extremely low percentage of users that ask questions online or participate in chat. But that will vary, depending on saturation of the language. Pascal has been around for many decades. A lot of questions have already been asked, and there is a lot of documentation available online.
If it were a valid metric than every tool and language is greatly exaggerated as far as actual number of users.
The number of users asking questions in forums or in chat as just a tip of the iceberg.
But from my own experience there are many tools and languages I use that I've never asked questions online or participated in any sort of chat. (unless somehow asking a search engine is the same as asking a question online, and I don't consider it that to be the same).
And the same goes for many of my technology peers.
And on the ones where I have asked a question online, that participation is extremely low compared to my actual usage of that tool or technology. There are tools and languages I've used almost day for years at work, and never once had to actively participate in an online forum or chat to get an answer. And as before, it seems to be the same for most of my technology peers that I've worked with.
The vast majority of my pascal questions, including things specific to free pascal, I'm able to find the answers online, without asking in a forum or in chat.
Many people also watch you tube videos to learn things. If you go to youtube and search for pascal programming you will get a lot of tutorials people have made on how to do things in pascal.
Videos are not for everyone as a far as learning tool, but for many they are.
As far as I can tell, in using Pascal and in using other technologies and tools out there, pascal is not somehow unique in requiring only forums and chat to get help.
And as far as the forums go, most of the time I don't need to ask new a question. Someone else already asked it, and somebody else already answered it. So no need for me to ask again. I do ask about things where I can't find concrete answers for, but that is by far the minority of my questions. As I've stated, for a majority of my questions I ask a search engine, and it finds the answer I'm looking for, after I sift out the results that don't directly apply to what I'm looking for.
But back to original reason why I made this reply, from my perspective as far as showing usage, downloads are far better metric than forum participation or chat participation.