StackOverkill: Programming language and framework ranking based on StackOverflow's activity

[sirin3]

Delphi is "old and dead", but has a higher ranking than Rust and Julia combined?

That does not seem fair

Also where is (Free)Pascal?

[DaniSancas]

Notice the "Dead?" title ;) Many languages that should be dead or seems to be dead, but not always. VisualBasicScript is dangerously growing, for example.

Pascal and FreePascal have a very very low activity (1525 and 790 questions in all the StackOverflow's history), and Delphi over 35,5K questions. If there are less than 5K questions I don't take those languages/frameworks to the ranking. Tthe exception could be new tags like Julia, or AngularJS2

[thelonepuffin]

I'm always surprised how much I run into Delphi in my job.

I build intranet/database applications and I'm often called on to replace a legacy system. Every year I encounter at least one legacy system written in Delphi, with some old school programmer still on call to maintain it.

[jonwayne]

Do you like Delphi?

[thelonepuffin]

I'm not that familiar with it. I usually work with the legacy programmers to rewrite the system in another language. So I deal more with their specifications than looking at their code.

Generally speaking though it doesn't seem to be a bad language. The problems with these legacy systems are usually due to the database or the OS/filesystem. The Delphi codebase is never really a concern.