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Oct 09 2008

Delphi back in Top Ten

Posted by Olaf Monien in Delphi, Development, Miscellaneous, tags: , , , ,

As I recently noticed and already mentioned by Jim McKeeth Delphi made it back into the Top Ten of TIOBE’s Programming Community Index. Actually “we” are Ninth! :-)

Unfortunately TIOBE’s history chart is inaccurate (it shows the history for the current top ten, not including those which fell off the index), but I think Delphi was kicked off in 2006/2007. Imo, this happened mainly because of two factors: emerging dynamic languages (Ruby and JavaScript) and the spin-off announcement (remember DevCo?), which made quite some Delphi folks believe it would all go down hill now, thus moving to other programming communities.

The interesting thing is that C# is Eighth and is very close to Delphi, so with some community efforts we might make it next month :-)

Important is to understand how TIOBE collects its statistical data. They basically perform +”<language> programming” searches on Google. So its important that all Delphi relevant pages contain a “Delphi programming” phrase. In other words: If you want to help pushing Delphi up, make sure all your Blog pages etc contain “Delphi programming”.

I just checked my own blog and what a shame, I have “Delphi” but not “Delphi programming” – I immediately updated that though :-)

To check your own pages just enter this in Google:

http://www.google.de/search?q=site%3Awww.YourSiteHere.com+%2B”delphi+programming”

I ran a few quick searches, and found that there is obviously a lot of room for improvements ;-)

Site Hits
www.hadihariri.com 0
www.monien.biz 0
www.flickdotnet.de 1
codegear.com 2
blog.marcocantu.com 5
blogs.codegear.com 7
www.marcocantu.com 25
www.drbob42.com 34
www.delphi.org 91
www.delphifeeds.com 1060
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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 at 9:20 and is filed under Delphi, Development, Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • jimmckeeth

    Excellent Olaf! If everyone does that and makes sure their pages about Delphi programming actually says Delphi Programming then we just might bump C# from number 8!

  • Holger

    Why should I add Delphi Programming everywhere? Programming in or with Delphi kind of implicates Delphi Programming. So no need to spill any more Delphi Programming on my page about Delphi Programming in order to push the Google keyword stats for Delphi Programming. However, CodeGear should have some more Delphi Programming references ;) So, Happy Delphi Programming everybody :-) <This should boost the stats…>

  • http://www.monien.net/blog Olaf Monien

    Well, not everywhere, but on all “relevant” pages. For example take this page:
    http://www.flickdotnet.de/index.php/2008/09/del…
    It's definitely on Delphi Programming, but it won't be counted, as it misses the phrase ….

  • ibandyop

    @Holger
    You should add Delphi Programming to your page because Delphi is also a large Automotive conglomerate that has a lot of web pages and also is a place in Greece.
    Probably TIOBE collection method cannot make the distinction easily.

  • Rick

    You should re-read Olaf's and Jim post – IT clearly explains “Why should I add Delphi Programming everywhere?”

  • RIF

    Careful how you read this statistics.

    It looks all pretty with these 4 green arrows, but you could have green arrows while actual losing overall percentage of market. This would happen when the place(s) directly above Delphi just loses more. So for Tiobe only read the ratings and delta column, and indeed this month it look fine.

    Olaf, I have followed your idea and tried the search on some more sites. First column is searching for “delphi programming”, second is just searching for delphi.

    delphibasics.co.uk 2 1550
    delphi.wikia.com 17 5660
    delphi-treff.de 6 20100
    nldelphi.com 19 8020
    developpez.com 0 14300

    So even if delphibasics have more than 1000 pages on Delphi programming it counts very little. Also notice the French site developpez which is a general programming site but writes a fair amount about Delphi will not be counted in. That show that the stats are skewed towards the programming languages position in English speaking markets, e.g. US, where Delphi never have been a strong player and hence end up with a lower score.

    Until Tiobe fix up their flawed data collection methods, the best one can do is understand how limited this stat is and follow Olaf's advice to avoid that your Delphi site is not counted.

  • TDelphiHobbyist

    About.Delphi.com comes back with quite a large number of hits :)

    Did you notice in the October Newsflash at the TIOBE site:
    “Some languages such as Delphi have extreme low scores for Google blogs. This will be figured out a next time. “
    We may be in for yet another bit of a boost.

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