...I think he is mocking us for having a small community...
I'm wondering about the phrase "small community". Can be understood as:
- people who actively participate in this forum, i.e. have registered an account here, log in quite often,
- users of the Free Pascal compiler and/or Lazarus environment,
- people who program in Object Pascal.
Ad. 1. Each participant can check how large this group is after logging in or while browsing.
Ad.2. This group is certainly much larger. Many people use the tools mentioned above. They do not register because the compiler and library documentation or just reading the Lazarus forum is enough for them. And they often browse Stack Overflow and other forums.
Ad. 3. People from this group usually program in Delphi, but occasionally they also use Free Pascal or Lazarus.
Of course, a lot of people in these three groups also use other programming languages.
I was classified in group three myself for many years. But at some point I came across the Free Pascal compiler project website. Then you could say that I "jumped" to group 2. Searching topics and reading content on the forum was enough for me for a very long time. But at some point I wanted to participate in the discussions (it was a few years ago). So, how many such people are there in groups 2 and 3? I suspect a lot (of course still less than in the case of C++, not to mention other languages).
However, when it comes to the popularity of programming languages, I think that it would be necessary to conduct a decent sociological study on this topic. I think it would make an interesting doctoral thesis. In any case, the reason for the popularity and unpopularity of programming languages is largely unrelated to their advantages
1). Rather, it results primarily from:
- decisions made in the past by IT companies (e.g. ATT -> C),
- the amount of money pumped into popularizing a given solution (e.g. SUN -> Java, Microsoft -> C#),
- similarities between newer and older solutions (e.g. C++ to C, then C# and Java to C++),
- negative campaigns carried out by the management boards of corporations in order to increase their revenues, i.e. attacking and fighting competition (FUDs, etc.) and the technologies provided by this competition (Microsoft vs Borland [Delphi], Microsoft vs SUN [Java]),
- spreading and perpetuating naive/false/crude myths (urban legends) about IT technology by the media and ordinary people - the scale ranges from mild cases (malicious nonsense jokes) to complete blind ferocity and aggression (IT sectarianism).
I certainly did not manage to give all the non-substantive reasons for the popularity of these languages, which are at the top of various "street rankings" (e.g. TIOBE). The topic is so broad that I have barely scratched the surface.
However, returning to the main topic: there are, of course, many portals such as
LeetCode. They exist to make money for their owners (a typical premium service - a bit of something simple as an incentive, and if you get hooked and want more, you pay). After all, companies are set up to bring income to their owners.
In my opinion, the effort put into engaging the Free Pascal/Lazarus community on the
LeetCode portal will be disproportionate to the benefits obtained. In short: it is very unprofitable. So it doesn't make sense.
1) We should not draw the wrong conclusions from this, i.e. that these languages have no advantages, or that the people who use them do not take into account some of their advantages. However, a feature of a specific object that people perceive as an advantage is not always objectively so.
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