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Nice visualization. Like always with such statistical data one should ask where does this come from ? How does GitHub evaluate "popularity" ? Isn't "popularity" just high because you can do small tasks easily ? Maybe such popularity index must be weighted against the complexity of projects as well. This also gives a clue to what developers maybe really like, as its seems to be a kind of simplifications in the language itself (JS amd Python). Anyhow, I don't really agree on this, as typed languages has a much practical benefits. Easy-to-learn is maybe not the only core feature of popular languages. From my experience, the languages are more or less irrelevant, but the libraries and frameworks do. I like all C languages, because they are "readable" for me, as C++ developer, although there are still many different features in each of them. Aren't JS/Python not only that popular because of their fantastic libraries and frameworks out there ? For me the key benefit of a language is not to support all small features like Nullable or Inline variables (nice to have, but not mission critical), but most important for me are stable and effective frameworks (VCL/FMX), encapsulating the complexity of the real world underneath. Regarding Delphi I would like to ask: Why can't I use ALL the core libraries of the modern OS, like beacons, sensors, ARKit, etc. etc. at 100% yet ? If so, there would be no need to move to Swift, JS or C#, only because I need to solve a special task, unreachable from FMX right now. Same for VCL and WinRT, but the situation is much more relaxed there, from the history of Delphi. Maybe I'm wrong, and there are different opinions for sure, but I would put most efford on building infrastructure and quality around libraries, instead of trying to follow the last hype in language theory. The "ease-of-use" is not by leaning only 20 keywords instead of 40, but to be able to use powerful libraries that encapsule all OS features in a nicely, cross-platform way, which are easy to learn, self-explaining, consistent, powerful and error-free. Furthermore to have powerful debugging tools as well, around this infrastructure.

I have been talking with Yaroslav Brovin recently (the creator of FGX native) and this project is going to be in public beta at the beginning of 2020. Would it be a good idea to make a section for it? If not now at least when the beta starts. FGX native will be an add on for the Delphi IDE This is a webinar unfortunately only in Russian; btw this will work for Android only at the beginning, iOS will come later. I attach some pictures of the documentation. More info on FGX are here: http://fire-monkey.ru/forum/370-native-fgx/ (use https://translate.yandex.com/ which is a good russian-english translator)

Despite its name, UCS4String is not actually a native string type, like (Ansi|Raw|UTF8|Unicode|Wide)String are. It is just a dynamic 'array of UCS4Char', so a null UCS4Char is added to the end of the array to allow for null-terminated-string semantics, ie you can type-cast a UCS4String to PUCS4Char and iterate the string up to the null terminator, just like any other null-terminated P(Ansi|Wide)Char string. UCS4String was introduced way back in Delphi 6 (when UTF8String was first added as just an alias for AnsiString), so it couldn't be added as a true native string type back then. They never made UCS4String into a native string type, even though the RTL is now flexible enough to support a native string with 4-byte characters. All of the necessary plumbing was added in Delphi 2009 when UnicodeString was first introduced and UTF8String was turned into its own unique string type. UCS4String could easily be made into a native string type now, if they really wanted to. They probably haven't done so yet because UCS4String is very seldomly used by anyone, so they likely didn't want to waste development resources on it. Yes, because Length() is simply returning the full array length, which includes the null UCS4Char at the end.

@David Heffernan http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/Rio/en/System.UCS4String Your were spot on.

I've not ever looked at this function but it's not hard to see what must be going on. There is no 4 byte string type. So you'll be getting a dynamic array back. And there will be a null terminator as there is for all non short string types. But since there is no compiler support for treating the type as a string, you just get the dyn array length function, which counts the null terminator.

https://larsfosdal.blog/2019/10/10/most-popular-programming-languages-1965-2019/ Stumbled on a nice video showing the rise and fall of Pascal and Delphi. That said, like Cobol, Delphi will take a looong time disappearing.