Nils Eilers, 07.04.2017

The Delphi programming language originally evolved from Turbo Pascal and Object Pascal. The first version of Delphi was released by Borland in 1995, before Delphi was later spun off into CodeGear. CodeGear—and therefore Delphi—was acquired by Embarcadero in 2008. Since 2015, Embarcadero has been part of Idera, which has been actively working to improve accessibility to Delphi.

This effort is supported by the free Delphi Starter Edition and the continued provision of campus licenses for universities and public institutions, such as the University of Bremen, the University of Applied Sciences Lübeck, and the Ruhr University Bochum. Additionally, Delphi is used in introductory computer science courses in schools in South Africa.

The fact that there is a renewed interest in Delphi can be observed through the TIOBE Index (https://www.tiobe.com) over the past few years. The TIOBE Index provides a ranking of programming languages based on their demand across various search engines. This ranking can indicate the interest in each programming language.

It is important to note that the TIOBE Index is solely based on search engine queries, meaning that these rankings cannot be directly translated to the actual prevalence of the languages. However, increased search queries are a strong indicator of growing interest, and interest in Delphi appears to have steadily increased in recent years.

In 2017, Delphi moved from position 11 to position 9 compared to the previous year. Java continues to dominate the index at the top spot, followed by C, C++, C#, Python, Visual Basic, PHP, and JavaScript ahead of Delphi or Object Pascal.

Based on Idera's focus on promoting Delphi, particularly among young developers, and the increasing interest, one can cautiously hope for a growing adoption of Delphi. With a larger user base and community, the exchange of knowledge and accumulated expertise will be enhanced.