StackOverflow 2024 Survey shows Delphi in decline
How to explain Delphi price increases
Delphi’s low ratings
StackOverflow is a Q&A site which hosts an annual developer survey.
Every year, a minuscule number of developers polled, use Delphi. This year, the number of Delphi developers dropped from 3.25% to 1.8%, a recessive decline.
Developer Survey 2021 - 02.10% - 1,731 / 83,052
Developer Survey 2022 - 03.25% - 2,311 / 71,547
Developer Survey 2023 - 03.23% - 2,831 / 87,585
Developer Survey 2024 - 01.80% - 1,084 / 60,171Last year, a previous Delphi product manager posts to participate the in StackOverflow 2023 developer survey. This year… there is no posts asking to developers to participate.
Some developers say - there has been 27,414 less developers in 2024 survey, if Delphi developers, there would at least 1,958 developers.
Github lists 2,890 public repositories for Delphi, while there are 554,919 public repositories for Javascript. Delphi is at 0.005% of JavaScript. Now, if you add the FreePascal folks, (2890 + 2210), Delphi stands at 0.01% of publicly available Github repositories.
Delphi Price Increases
Nearly every few years, formerly Borland, CodeGear, DevCo would increase their SA (Software Assurance) annual subscription.
Many developers, are up in arms over Delphi software assurance price increases, and new features reserved in higher SKUs. AnyDac had direct connectors to MSSQL, MySQL and Oracle. When Embarcadero brought over AnyDac and renamed it to FireDac, they reserved MSSQL, MySQL and Oracle connectors to higher SKUs.
Buying Delphi professional wasn’t enough - you had to get Delphi Enterprise — for full version of InterWeb, compiling to Linux and FMXLinux.
How to get more developers to use Delphi?
As most Github Delphi repositories are mostly untouched. Upgrading after an expired SA (refers to Software Assurance, not S|A) incurs costs and penalties, and the list of issues raised that goes unanswered -
What would you do to increase developer usage of Delphi? A brief list of ideas include:
Self-service to deactivate and re-activate licenses,
Amnesty for software pirates, amnesty for upgraders, and sponsoring content-makers on YouTube.
Making 50%, 70% special discounts available in more regions, although news and promotion offers are scant.
Upsell more goods and services. A VCL or FMX store for components, similar to ComponentSource? Perhaps Embarcadero doesn’t Get-It.