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!