Quote Originally Posted by Lifepower View Post
Although commits could indirectly imply the popularity of Pascal, I don't think it's an accurate measure as they are many more closed-source projects that are not being monitored.
Yes, but activity on those closed-source projects is unlikely to exhibit trends completely opposite to those of open source on the same language, while TIOBE f.i. can be fooled by synonyms (a rise in "Delphi" fro TIOBE could actually be attributed to problems at the automobile parts manufacturer).

Quote Originally Posted by Lifepower View Post
Delphi 2006-2007 was a huge jump since Delphi 7 both in language and IDE features.
Yeah, but they were dire in terms of usability, not as dire as D2005, but dire still, and those new features just weren't stable enough until D2009 (and even then, generics in D2009 are problematic, both at the compiler and RTL levels). The stability of the IDE was also not quite there.

Open-source trend in 2009 could be mostly due to delayed reaction to free versions of Turbo Delphi and growing community of FPC/Lazarus.
Lazarus is certainly showing activity, and the top individual committers revolve around Lazarus or FPC, though Lazarus itself is by far the largest FPC/Lazarus project, and it shows different peaks, f.i. https://www.ohloh.net/p/lazarus

As for real trendy languages, the winners are obviously Python & JavaScript, all the others seem to be either stable (like Java or PHP) or losing ground (C, C++, C#, Ruby...), just to place things in perspective.