Around this time last month, I posted that Delphi had made great trends up on the TIOBE index, but that I thought that it’s place still was not accurately reflected. Well, I had some discussions about this with TIOBE and this month, Delphi moves on up another two places! Now a top 10 language up 10 places in little more than a year.

In the past, and including last month, the categories of “Pascal” and “Object Pascal” have been separated on the index. When I read the data, the “Pascal” listing just seemed to be far higher than it should, given that no one has used traditional pascal in 20+ years. I figured that there must be something wrong with the way the data was being presented. This is what I discussed with TIOBE.

Before giving you the result of those discussions, there seemed to be some confusion with my argument last month. Some readers thought that I was arguing specifically to improve the ranking of “Delphi”, and that perhaps the results should be separated out further by compiler. This is not the way the TIOBE index works, they list language rather than compiler except in cases where the variants are different enough to have their own wiki page (and are basically independent languages). I like the way this works, because when we talk about most programming languages we’re really referring to the syntax more so than the supporting libraries, the compiler, the IDE and so on.

I have no interest in boosting Delphi as a product over Object Pascal as a language, it makes little sense. Object Pascal is the language employed by the Delphi product. I also have no interest in unfairly boosting ratings for Delphi (well some interest, I work for Embarcadero, but that was never my aim). I just wanted “Object Pascal” to be fairly represented.

If you look at the websites of other Object Pascal compilers, they’ll tell you that their compiler is either a clone of Delphi, or a variant of the Object Pascal syntax made popular by Delphi. For this reason I feel the language is correctly listed as “Object Pascal” regardless of the compiler, which helps promote ALL pascal compilers. It’s also the way that TIOBE works, and I happen to agree with their policy on this.

In the case of the separation of Pascal from Object Pascal, the TIOBE policy was unfair to Object Pascal. Many of the results which belonged to Object Pascal were being attributed to Pascal. The email back-and-forth between TIOBE and myself lead to an investigation, in which it was found that 95% of the Pascal hits should have been attributed to Object Pascal. Consequently, this week the February TIOBE post correctly attributes the extra 95% to Object Pascal! …

From this months TIOBE post…

“Craig Chapman pointed out that most sites that refer to Pascal are actually referring to Object Pascal. After some investigation, it has been decided to assign 95% of the Pascal sites to Object Pascal and only 5% to Pascal itself. Thanks to this change Delphi/Object Pascal re-entered the TIOBE index top 10.”

Read the full TIOBE index post here: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

I was hoping that the extra numbers in favor of Object Pascal would have a bigger impact on it’s position in the index. None the less, I am very pleased to see the upward move. I am also thankful for the notable mention in the blog post.

Thanks for Reading!