This is the third year Delphi is listed in the very large StackOverflow survey and results for the language are very much in line with last year.
The Delphi programming language is officially listed in the most recent StackOverflow developers survey, like in the last couple of years. Before we get to some of the details, the short summary is that Delphi usage hasn’t changed, going from at 3.25% to 3.23% and the same position in terms of ranking. The number of developers who picked Delphi was 2,831, which is a higher absolute number than last year!
More on Programming Languages
You can read more in the survey announcement blog post as, https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/06/13/developer-survey-results-are-in/. As this blog post also reports, “three popular languages increase their standing: Python, Bash/Shell (all shells), and C” with Python moving to the second position after JavaScript (I personally refuse to consider HTML/CSS a programming language, despite the survey having it in the second place).
The same blog post has an interesting observation: “The more popular a programming language is, the less experience on average we see reported from developers this year”. In other words, the most popular languages are used by a very large extend by new developers. This makes sense, they are growing technologies, but also highlights significant differences between the most experienced professional developers and other groups.
The other interesting piece of data is in the “Admired and Desired” section. The site explains that “a technology showing a wide distance (>60 percentage points)… generates more desire to use it once you get to know it“. They mention Rust as an example. This is also true for Delphi, which as has 60 percentage points between Desired and Admired.
Other Notable Areas
In the IDE section, RAD Studio remains much lower than the Delphi language, at 2.27%. This remains a bit odd. Visual Studio Code at 74% has almost 3 times the votes of the runner up, which is actually Visual Studio.
In the database section, PostreSQL continues to lead over MySQL (although MariaDB has also many votes). Outside of the SQL space, MongoDB and Redis lead the group. Among the Cloud platforms, AWS remains king, with Azure and Google Cloud battling for the second place. Among the other tools, Docker is at top, along with popular package managers.
While ChatGPT leads in the AI tools, the specific category of AI Developer Tools see GitHub Copilot with a large lead on Tabnine and AWS CodeWhisperer, two solutions I find very nice (even if they don’t currently support Delphi).
Overall, this is a very interesting read: This is certainly a good survey not tied to a vendor or a specific community of developers, like most others. It’s always good to see Delphi in a nice spot in the StackOverflow survey!
Design. Code. Compile. Deploy.
Start Free Trial Upgrade Today
Free Delphi Community Edition Free C++Builder Community Edition
Good, I didn’t know about this stack overflow data, great news.
If Delphi had more focus on web applications it could be far more known and desired. The world is web!
If people could use the Delphi way of building applications for building web applications, it would be on the top charts of the next stackoverflow survey.
I hope this changes for the next years.
In the 1980s, I was active on a number of fronts in network and applications dev. One day, a popular journal called me and asked about languages in our company. I did most of my dev in those days in Pascal versions, though we used several different languages. The reporter wondered why I chose Pascal. Faced with my answer, he then wondered why, if Borland’s Pascal (I forget which version at the time) was so much better, IMO, than the competition, and I had provided specific examples for my opinion, a majority of his respondents voted for C. I said that it was because journals such as his routinely published popularity contests, not performance discussions, and newbies read those journals and took the ‘popular’ position as their own, without knowing much about the field. Then, when asked to respond to a survey, they simply parroted back what they read. Voila! C is the ‘best’ language. The reported decided to run another survey, asking what developers used the most. Pascal was the clear winner. He called me back to discuss the fact that most of the responders /used/ Pascal, and said that C was their fave. Had he not done the followup survey, he would not have had that insight. Because I worked in a multi-language dev enviro, I had plenty of real-world experience to base decisions on.
About the same time, I attended a conference in CA. One of the speakers was a popular C protagonist. During his presentation, he often compared C to Pascal, making several wrong statements along the way. After the conference, we wound up at the same airport, waiting for our flight, and decided to have dinner and chat. During the meal, he made the same wrong statements, and I corrected him, saying that I’d be happy to provide all the black and white evidence to back up my statements. I had ample opportunity to collect such data (see above), and my habit was to document all my work. He was stunned. He said that he believed all the stuff he said, but had never validated his opinions. A huge problem with that was that, as a popular speaker, he was spreading misinformation at every conference, and of course, as an ‘expert’, he carried a lot of weight.
I have some excellent news for you – thanks to our fully-open IDE architecture we have not one but (currently) *FOUR* AI plug-ins, plus we have had several webinars showing various different ways to use OpenAI, ChatGPT, and Bard etc in RAD Studio. Note that these are available, without charge, via GetIt which I think differs from VS where you need to have paid subscriptions to GitHub or other Microsoft services.
We have a coding Bootcamp this week and one session will show you live how to use ChatGPT in RAD Studio.
Here’s a screenshot showing you the four current AI helpers available for free in RAD Studio via GetIt.