how many Delphi users over the world? [closed]

Question

A few years ago, in a newsgroup thread, Michael Swindell revealed that there was about 1.75 million single users of Delphi (click Here for the thread).
What is the status today ? Can somebody tell us how the Delphi community evolved? Michael again? Nick? Anybody else?

Question reopened. The OP comment below helps explain the reason why and deserves to be here IMO (François):
The target of the question was to know if Delphi has still a solid user base. In my company, we are in need to rewrite a lot of legacy applications. Delphi seems like a very good choice but to convince my bosses, I needed to prove them that Delphi is more than just surviving. So I do not consider my question is so far from programming.

Answer 1

Michael Swindell did update his figure in an August 2008 e-week article:

Swindell said the community of Delphi and C++Builder developers continues to grow. In 2006 there were 1.75 million Delphi developers and now there are more than 2 million, he said.

But I think this number is a bit high due to other evidence:

A year ago, Nick Hodges asked the question: How many developers are there in the world? The accepted answer was 12 million.

If the 12 million is correct, then the 1.75 million would be too high, since Delphi is only 9th in the Tiobe index. In a comment on Marcu Cantu's blog, it is suggested that the 1.75 million is the total number of licenses sold since D1, and NOT the number of users. Bruce McGee in another conversation agreed it was unique license holders.

On Meta Stack Overflow was this question: What is the number and distribution of the regular programmers in the world? The answer there quoted Evans Data which estimated about 15.2 million plus other info.

So ballpark agreement is from 10 to 20 million programmers.

Now what percentage would be Delphi? At 9th on the list, Tiobe indicates it is at 2.684% which is as good an estimate as any. If so, then I'd say maybe there's 250,000 to 500,000 Delphi programmers. That's still quite a lot when you think about it.

Answer 2

Who cares? I'm being serious here so read on before downvoting.

It doesn't matter how many Delphi programmers are in Australia if your company is based in North Dakota and wants to hire people locally.

Take a look at the LOCAL job boards and talk to some recruiters. Find out what percentage of Delphi jobs are open or being filled compared to other languages. That right there will tell you whether you have a developer pool large enough to go forward with a long term project in that language.