The Stack Overflow survey is up. There are some questions where you could answer "Delphi" in the Other answer section, eg languages and technology you use (questions 9 and 10), IDE you use (question 22), etc. Last year Delphi barely showed up at all, so if you can take the time to fill this survey out, please do.
The Stack Overflow survey is up. There are some questions where you could answer "Delphi" in the Other answer section, eg languages and technology you use (questions 9 and 10), IDE you use (question 22), etc. Last year Delphi barely showed up at all, so if you can take the time to fill this survey out, please do.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/so-2016
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/so-2016
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/so-2016
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/so-2016
Stuart Clennett If you've got a db back end, why not just use a web front end?
ReplyDelete"Last year Delphi barely showed up at all"
ReplyDeleteThat's putting it mildly. I crunched the data in 2015 and there were 121 appearances of Delphi or Pascal out of 26,082 responses.
Even what showed up wasn't very encouraging: the number who did not have Delphi/pascal in their current tools but who had it in their "future tech" tools: 8. Out of those who were using it, 39 had it in their "future tech" column but 82 did not.
If it's a representative sample, it shows that the 7,000 foot tall elephant in the room is where/how new developers are going to come to the language. We're bleeding developers off but there's no sign of any interest from non-users.
I'd put a poll up on Google Plus' programming community and over 1,000 people responded regarding commercial languages. Out of those, 66% chose the most negative response: they would not use a proprietary language because there isn't any need for one nowadays. I believe 8-11% said they were using one now. Most telling, three people asked what a proprietary language was and had to have it explained to them! Even some others thought it meant a language a company developed solely for internal use. When I finally explained what I meant the response I got was "Oh, well, there's not too many of those around anymore, are there?" In fact, after brainstorming, the only language anyone could think of that fit the definition was Visual Basic, which of course is long-discontinued. One person asked in response to the option, "It would depend on the price", "Exactly how much would they be paying me to have to use their language?" ;-) Others called it career suicide.
I'm not convinced the powers that be, who have generally spent their entire careers producing/supporting a commercial language, truly realize how they're viewed nowadays and the massive negative bias that needs to be overcome. It's no longer the 1980s and no one wants to get locked into a vendor anymore; many spent a generation trying to unlock themselves from Microsoft. The younger generation simply has never needed to pay for a computer language. In fact, I was reading an article yesterday about open source and venture funding and the argument was that FOSS development tools are underfunded. There was one line that went, "You could no more charge someone to program in Python than you could charge them to speak English." I thought "You can charge people to program in Delphi!" but then I realized that this author, too, is probably too young to even realize commercial languages ever really existed.
Joseph Mitzen No one came up with c#? Really?
ReplyDelete