I get this same thing from the Delphi users forum, where the diehards strain to convince themselves that Delphi has "three million users" and "is about as popular as Python". They insist that there's no reason Stack Overflow questions should be correlated with real-world usage. One suggested, seriously, that perhaps Delphi is just so easy to use that users don't need to ask questions. This excuse has been adopted to explain a lack of commercially published books ("maybe everything to say about Delphi has already been said") and there was even an attempt to explain away job posting data. In that case it was theorized that Delphi jobs are filled as soon as they're posted while Java jobs go unfilled for months so when you see thousands of Java jobs on Dice but no Delphi jobs that actually means there's a huge Delphi jobs market and no one's actually using Java. :-(
Never underestimate how far users of "sunset technologies" will go to convince themselves that their skill set is outdated. Heck, Embarcadero's C++ product manager insists that "customers tell him" that Delphi (Pascal!) is "five times more productive than Python" and he actually believes this too. The Delphi product manager, meanwhile, told me he sincerely believes that Delphi has had more of an impact on the business world than Python ever has. Meanwhile, the former VP of Developer Relations once polled the first 500 people to upgrade to their newest release of Delphi, crunched the data, and concluded that users really love Delphi (of course, the many who felt the upgrade was light on features and high on price and chose not to upgrade weren't reflected in the data).
Never underestimate how far users of "sunset technologies" will go to convince themselves that their skill set is outdated. Heck, Embarcadero's C++ product manager insists that "customers tell him" that Delphi (Pascal!) is "five times more productive than Python" and he actually believes this too. The Delphi product manager, meanwhile, told me he sincerely believes that Delphi has had more of an impact on the business world than Python ever has. Meanwhile, the former VP of Developer Relations once polled the first 500 people to upgrade to their newest release of Delphi, crunched the data, and concluded that users really love Delphi (of course, the many who felt the upgrade was light on features and high on price and chose not to upgrade weren't reflected in the data).
It makes me want to pull my hair out.