Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Petition to TIOBE to re-check Delphi community index

Dear Sirs,

This open letter is reply towards your publishing of TIOBE, in regard "Delphi" programming language.

As cited on your website, TIOBE is taken from number of skilled engineers, courses and third-party vendors, along with popular search engines are used to calculate the ratings.

Delphi is grouped under:
Grouping: Delphi, Kylix, Object Pascal, Free Pascal, Chrome (Exception: "Google"), Oxygene, Delphi.NET

Your reviewer would like to refine that group a little:
1) Freepascal is not part of Delphi, so it should be excluded. That also includes Free-pascal related things, such as Lazarus. Since Delphi and Lazarus are 2 different things, they need to be different.

For example, people who use FreePascal/Lazarus are totally different users than Delphi users.

2) Exclude duplicate archives. For example, there are several newsgroup dustbins, such as BorlandTalk.com, Tamaraka.com (or HREF's search engine archive), MarcoCantu's newsgroup archive (newswhat.com), CodeNewsfast.com, Cryer.co.uk (their newsgroup archive), mail-archive.com's duplicate archive of certain Delphi email discussion groups, and coding.derkeiler.com...

Thus, 1 post on the Embarcadero newsgroups would be duplicated 10 times. If there were 10,000 posts, it would be magnified 10 times, giving Delphi developers false sense of security.

3) Exclude "delphi.non-technical" and "off-topic", since those are not-serious discussions. Maybe the non-technical and off-topic exists solely to make people think Delphi is serious language...

4) Check when site was last updated. If site was not updated since 2005, then it should be excluded in TIOBE, since that site is no longer active. (There are plenty of sites of this kind in Delphi community).

5) Duplicate-check blogs. Now with twitter, blog aggregations, content on these sites should be counted once, and exclude duplicates.

6) Include comparisons of Delphi jobs listing vs. C#, vs Java and other languages into factor, and into your TIOBE community index.

7) Include comparisons of Book sales from respected sites which publish sales figures, and into your TIOBE community index.

8) TIOBE needs Kylix as separate language. This is self-explanatory. Since Kylix is dead (or nearly dead), we will then know how exactly it fares compares, to, say, ActionScript (or maybe Prolog?) and how many people use Kylix. It would be joking to say there are still users using Kylix when you can use Java/Mono/PHP/Ruby/Python in Linux/Mac environment.

In such situation, your reviewer thinks, Delphi should be NOT be in the top-20 languages., it should have less than 0.5% share, similar to MATLAB, Scratch and Cobol.

At least, with Cobol, you can get decent job. In Delphi, you work like a dog all year long and don't earn enough decent money.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Late comment, but...

I think it's well known that the TIOBE index is being gamed in favour of Delphi. And it's pretty much the only index where Delphi looks good.

The data from Google Trends reflects my overall view of the scene much better than TIOBE. Interesting how dead Delphi 2007 looks there when comparing Delphi versions. Also it doesn't look like Unicode-Delphi has really taken off.

Gad D Lord said...

"It is pretty much the only index where Delphi looks good". I wonder what other sources you have? Please share.

Unknown said...


I still don't understand why
do I have to look for Delphi
job. I am writing software for
my customer and most of them
are satisfied with the speed
that Delphi offer. Even though
Delphi is still buggy.
Do programmers have always
finding job and work for
damn others.

Unknown said...

I don't understand why do
programmers have to look for
a job at all time.

Do you still can sell your
own software at all ?