Object Pascal decline?

[vicot]

Hi

according to various indexes (TIOBE, Google Trends), in the last few years there was a steep decline of interest in Delphi/Object Pascal. The best time, it seems, was around 2005, with a peak of market share.

I don't have hard data, so I cannot pass judgments, but *it seems* from the above-mentioned sources that there is now a considerable decline in Delphi/Object Pascal usage.
Is it really the case? If so, what are the causes, and what can we expect in the coming years?

[Leledumbo]

The problem with that (TIOBE) is that they consider Delphi ONLY as Object Pascal, despite the name Delphi/Object Pascal. They don't search for Lazarus, FPC, FreePascal or something that define us. The other general Pascal entry is somewhat gray.

Is it really the case? If so, what are the causes, and what can we expect in the coming years?

The cause is, AFAICS, is the inability of Embarcadero marketing division to sell Delphi with a proper strategy. That's it.

[vicot]

Another curious fact is that classic Pascal is often ranked higher (i.e. more widely used) than Delphi/Object Pascal! How can this be?
Who still uses classic Pascal, by the way?

[skalogryz]

...
according to various indexes (TIOBE, Google Trends), in the last few years there was a steep decline of interest in Delphi/Object Pascal...

True. Rise of mobile platforms pushed popularity of objc and java. Plus forcing of .net made its influence. Add growing web apps.
Just learn a few more popular languages to feel yourself comfortable, you'll be fine

[marcov]

Another curious fact is that classic Pascal is often ranked higher (i.e. more widely used) than Delphi/Object Pascal! How can this be?
Who still uses classic Pascal, by the way?

TIOBE has all kinds of wacky rules, which makes interpretation so hard. One of them is that the score is the maximum of various search terms, not the sum. That avoids duplication, but punishes languages which need searchterms to be cumulative. Similarly it promotes noisy "hot" communities.

Long time trends are difficult to follow, since the rules are constantly modified

So personally I think TIOBE is overrated, and a waste of perfectly good bits.

[typo]

Another curious fact is that classic Pascal is often ranked higher (i.e. more widely used) than Delphi/Object Pascal! How can this be?
Who still uses classic Pascal, by the way?

http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=pascal#q=delphi%2C%20pascal&cmpt=q

If there is higher interest on Pascal, sooner or later it will affect Lazarus. Both are falling, but Pascal is relatively rising against Delphi.

There is also a surge about old versions of Delphi and even a curious "free delphi" occurrence among top searches.

Also note that "programming" is deep falling.

http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=pascal#q=programming&cmpt=q

or

http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=pascal#q=php%2C%20html&cmpt=q

and even Android is stabilizing:

http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=pascal#q=android&cmpt=q

[hinst]

If you ask me... the whole world is in decline lately, all other trends are just fluctuations....,,,

[typo]

If Pascal is rising against Delphi and it does not affect Lazarus obviously, it can mean also that Lazarus is less known than it could be.

Another observation which could be made is that maybe Lazarus should position itself in relation with Pascal language (maybe as the "more advanced open source Pascal IDE" or something ) and not in relation with Delphi anymore.

[Avishai]

In my opinion, Lazarus could get a large boost by making a serious effort to fully support RightToLeft languages like Arabic and Hebrew.  I've done about all I can to help with this, which isn't much because I don't have the programming skills.

There are a few billion people that use RightToLeft language and the only programming environment that I know of that truly supports it is MS Visual Studio.  When I talk to my Israeli friends about Lazarus the first thing they ask is if it supports RightToLeft.  I have to say no and that's the end of the discussion.

Edit: I should have said that Delphi does a much better job of supporting RightToLeft on MSWindows than Lazarus, but like Lazarus, it's only at Run-Time.  MS Visual Studio supports it at Design-Time as well as Run-Time which is a huge advantage.

[vicot]

As a counter-argument to the supposed decline in Delphi/Object Pascal use, I want to mention something that I have just noticed: the highest recorded number of online users on this forum (560) was on 2013-02-27, which is quite recently.
This seems to indicate that, even if the market share of use (in terms of relative percentage) has diminished, the total number of users has probably kept increasing nonetheless.

[Windsurfer]

I agree with Avishai. Ignoring the population of a major part of the planet seems perverse, even if it requires some extensive work to fix ite  LibreOffice is making great strides as Free Software on a worldwide basis and Lazarus could do the same.

[vicot]

I agree about the need for full-fledged BiDi support. Where can we file a petition to the developers?

[typo]

I agree too, even if I can help nothing about that.

[BeniBela]

There are a bunch of things that are needed to stop it:

• Complete unicode support on fpc level, preferable with a real utf-8 string.  (you cannot have bidi support without being able to store the characters, and many languages that require bidi support use surrogate pairs, so utf-16 makes things worse)
• Mature generics/templates, with a generic container library (things like TStringList/TObjectList are braindead)
• More tests and less bugs
• Get rid of the "Pascal smell". People do not like Pascal, because they used Original Pascal in school and think it is a toy language. Perhaps rename fpc to something without Pascal in the name
• In-block variable declarations. for var i := 1 to .. do, the current way of declaring variables is scaring everyone who used a c-like away
• A native Android interface. (and soon, as long as mobile is still popular)
• An asm.js compilation target
• Lambda support

edit: stuff I forgot to write down here in the first version:

• layout manager, e.g. putting all controls in a grid like layout.  Anchors do not work for platform-independent softwares 
• garbage collector
• intuitive multi threading. perhaps like in smalltalk or go

[typo]

According to Google Trends, "Pascal smell" is beating Delphi smell. Since 2009, BTW.