The funny thing about that, is here we are in 2023. Lots of its competitors and haters are likely still asking, "Why won't it die?"

TIOBE index has Delphi/Object Pascal ranked at #11. That's ahead of "top players" like Go, Rust, and Swift.

In Germany we keep having a Delphi / C++ Builder developers conference, and maybe due to their relation to Anders, it is not surprising to see related articles on the .NET Developers Magazine.

Too bad the TIOBE index is not representative of the real world. And it certainly won't get you a job either. If I had to chose between go/rust and pascal/Delphi for a healthy ecosystem or for job offers, I know which one I would chose. Especially early in a career.

Ok maybe rust jobs aren't so common either, but swift and go are for sure.

And that's not even mentioning the de facto vendor lock in when using Delphi in most professional settings.

TIOBE is arguably the most reliable one, though all of them are arguably flawed in various ways.

Not saying the other languages mentioned don't have jobs, they are after all "top 20" languages too. But, Pascal/Object Pascal/Delphi is around a lot more and has more opportunities than many might be thinking. Especially from a worldwide point of view, and not just for the U.S.A Pascal/Delphi is still taught and used in a lot of schools around the world. While Go, Rust, and Swift are not. There are still massive amounts of legacy projects and code, not to mention Embarcadero is still selling Delphi and doing well enough to stay in business.

I think the mistake that some make is the time frames that it takes to displace older and previously popular or dominant languages. Popular this year or a few years, does not usually and instantly erase that some other language was popular for 20 or 30 years.

People run around saying COBOL, or even languages like Ada or PHP are dead, yet various institutions and companies are begging for programmers that know them. Those claiming a language is "dead", can be quite suspect too, because they are competitors who "wish" it to be so. "Is dead", "wish it was dead", or promoting sites "claiming the competitor's language is dead" are clearly a bit different.

Because a language is popular this year, does not necessarily offset all the years that an older language was popular and in use. Lastly, Object Pascal/Delphi did not just fall completely off the charts either or stopped being used at all. It stills maintains significant levels of competitive popularity around the world.

>Pascal/Delphi is still taught and used in a lot of schools around the world.

That's interesting, and good to know.

Good analysis, including the point about competitors.