Not the best metric, but Githut 2.0 allows you to look at which language repos get the largest percentage of stars on github. So the ebb-and-flow of enthusiasm for a language to some extent:

https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/stars/2019/3

So, if you disable all the languages and click D, we can see that D has been very stable for the past 6 years. Which might be sign of a loyal user base, given the amount of new languages appearing.

Nim seems to be oscillating at around the same level as D right now. Difficult to say what the trend will be.  Crystal and Julia as well.

Pascal is for some reason growing?

Rust has been very uneven, but there is a sharp increase over the last year, good press perhaps? Whereas Go has been growing like a straight line for 7 years. I suspect keeping the language stable has been something organizations appreciate, more of a steady increase than any burst of enthusiasm for Go.

Dart is peaking like a rocket this year (probably because of Flutter).  C++ has a trajectory like Go, but at half the rate. C# as well, but with less growth than C++.

Swift on the other hand is tapering off. Why is that? Have people given up on Swift outside the iOS segment?

Functional languages like Haskell and Clojure seem to have a negative trend. Maybe other languages are cutting into their field (e.g. Kotlin which is growing because of Android, most likely).

On Saturday, 7 December 2019 at 19:15:34 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> So, if you disable all the languages and click D, we can see that D has been very stable for the past 6 years. Which might be sign of a loyal user base, given the amount of new languages appearing.

On the plus side, in few years we should be catching up with Ruby.

Rust going up doesn't surprise me. It's past its critical mass and it will only go up in the future. Many big companies are adopting it right now and there's a lot of work done with Rust in many projects, from Microsoft to Google. Also most work in Rust (unlike say C#) is done in the open-source world, so you'll see it reflected in Github stars.

Dart's dramatic rise is interesting. I attribute it to Flutter, but it's crazy how much up it went.

Pascal is interesting, because it has a very dedicated community, but they shelter themselves from the outside world for the most part.

On Saturday, 7 December 2019 at 20:41:37 UTC, JN wrote:
> On the plus side, in few years we should be catching up with Ruby.

Is Ruby being swallowed up by Python perhaps?

> Also most work in Rust (unlike say C#) is done in the open-source world, so you'll see it reflected in Github stars.

Yes, the absolute values are not very informative, but the change over time can say something. So we can at least see that there is some enthusiasm for C#. But not for F#...

> Dart's dramatic rise is interesting. I attribute it to Flutter, but it's crazy how much up it went.

Yes, dramatic! Flutter has 10000 forks and is the software project on github with 2nd most developers on github after vscode or so. ( 13000 github developers according to  https://octoverse.github.com/ )


> Pascal is interesting, because it has a very dedicated community, but they shelter themselves from the outside world for the most part.

Yes, it is also interesting because there has been a drop in number of Pascal contributors:

https://www.openhub.net/languages/compare?language_name%5B%5D=pascal&measure=contributors

So, Pascal probably has a very loyal group of users.

On Saturday, 7 December 2019 at 21:38:16 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> Is Ruby being swallowed up by Python perhaps?

Has been for quite some time. Ruby was never that popular outside of Ruby on Rails. For the most part, RoR was Ruby. But RoR is not as popular anymore, Python and other languages adopted similar ideas for web frameworks and ate Ruby's lunch. Outside of Homebrew on macOS and Jekyll, the blog engine, I am not aware of any popular Ruby usages in the wild nowadays.

Unlike Python, it completely missed the science/ML train too, so it will only get worse.

> So, Pascal probably has a very loyal group of users.

Pascal is kind of magical. It's been around almost as long as C, has fast compile times, good IDE and GUI story (mostly as legacy of Delphi). It also did many things right, such as no header files. But most of its community is hanging out on several forums (like the Lazarus project forums) and they don't have the social media/Github presence compared to other, newer languages).

On Saturday, 7 December 2019 at 21:59:28 UTC, JN wrote:
> On Saturday, 7 December 2019 at 21:38:16 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
>> Is Ruby being swallowed up by Python perhaps?
>
> Has been for quite some time. Ruby was never that popular outside of Ruby on Rails. For the most part, RoR was Ruby. But RoR is not as popular anymore, Python and other languages adopted similar ideas for web frameworks and ate Ruby's lunch. Outside of Homebrew on macOS and Jekyll, the blog engine, I am not aware of any popular Ruby usages in the wild nowadays.
>
> Unlike Python, it completely missed the science/ML train too, so it will only get worse.
>
>> So, Pascal probably has a very loyal group of users.
>
> Pascal is kind of magical. It's been around almost as long as C, has fast compile times, good IDE and GUI story (mostly as legacy of Delphi). It also did many things right, such as no header files. But most of its community is hanging out on several forums (like the Lazarus project forums) and they don't have the social media/Github presence compared to other, newer languages).

Pascal is so strong in Germany, that we keep having Delphi conferences.

https://entwickler-konferenz.de/

And it is a regular subject on .NET developers magazine

https://www.dotnetpro.de/delphi-959606.html


In in spite of all bad decisions from Borland, Embarcadero, and whoever owns it nowadays.

Although most now gather around FreePascal.

One of my biggest disappointments with Java and .NET, was expecting them to be more like Delphi and getting a VM, and lack of value types (on Java) instead.

Now taking almost 30 years to fix those wrong decisions, with the onus of backward compatibility.

Imagine how safer the computing would would be if they would have been like Delphi, with automatic memory management.

Sadly D might not have been a thing, on the other hand C and C++ would not have grown as they did, given that they are also picked up due to their AOT tooling and value types support.

On Monday, 9 December 2019 at 07:30:03 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> Imagine how safer the computing would would be if they would have been like Delphi, with automatic memory management.

Do you have any links on the automatic memory management? Googling for "pascal memory management" mostly links to threads about how dreadful memory management in Pascal is :)

On Monday, 9 December 2019 at 08:55:13 UTC, JN wrote:
> On Monday, 9 December 2019 at 07:30:03 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>> Imagine how safer the computing would would be if they would have been like Delphi, with automatic memory management.
>
> Do you have any links on the automatic memory management? Googling for "pascal memory management" mostly links to threads about how dreadful memory management in Pascal is :)

Try to search for "delphi memory management"?

http://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/2018-october-Delphi-ARC-directions.html

It seems to be pretty much in the same situation as D. Locked down to GC + manual because of existing code bases.

On Monday, 9 December 2019 at 08:55:13 UTC, JN wrote:
> On Monday, 9 December 2019 at 07:30:03 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>> Imagine how safer the computing would would be if they would have been like Delphi, with automatic memory management.
>
> Do you have any links on the automatic memory management? Googling for "pascal memory management" mostly links to threads about how dreadful memory management in Pascal is :)

You misunderstood me.

Like Delphi in features, plus having automatic memory management.

Basically having .NET Native in 2000, or Java being like Modula-3 or Component Pascal/Active Oberon were.

Delphi itself only supports it partially, so strings management, reference counting for ARC on iDevice platforms and COM/UWP on Windows, and that is about it.

On Monday, 9 December 2019 at 10:46:33 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> On Monday, 9 December 2019 at 08:55:13 UTC, JN wrote:
>> On Monday, 9 December 2019 at 07:30:03 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>>> Imagine how safer the computing would would be if they would have been like Delphi, with automatic memory management.
>>
>> Do you have any links on the automatic memory management? Googling for "pascal memory management" mostly links to threads about how dreadful memory management in Pascal is :)
>
> Try to search for "delphi memory management"?
>
> http://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/2018-october-Delphi-ARC-directions.html
>
> It seems to be pretty much in the same situation as D. Locked down to GC + manual because of existing code bases.

Well, no gc out of the box:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4440841/garbage-collection-in-delphi

Free Pascal has an interface-thing that allows you to create your own memory management types:

https://wiki.freepascal.org/management_operators