Worst thing in popularity is not being considered, or found.
Looks like TIOBE is not alone in differentiating Delphi and Pascal, other popularity indexes share the same issue:
More indexes I looked at didn’t show the “runners up”, only the top 5 or top 10, but they may as well have differentiated.
For lang-index, merging Pascal (rank 11) and Delphi (24), would be enough to reach rank 10, ahead of Ruby, just shy of Perl.
For langpop, the results vary depending on indicators, but always up a few ranks, and into the top 10 in at least one case (hard figures are not given, so that’s just gauging the bar sizes).
Is popularity important? Yes, it affects perception by the industry at large.
Moving Pascal up in the popularity indexes from “obscure language” into the “mainstream but not commonplace” can’t hurt, can it?
The langpop was last updated in April of 2011.
You need to be careful that the differentiation is invalid before “correcting” it.
“Delphi” is legitimately only a subset of all Pascal languages. It is reasonable to expect that “Pascal”, generically, will rank higher than “Delphi” specifically. It is also UNreasonable to count ALL uses and variants of Pascal as indicative of the popularity of Delphi, especially since Delphi is only really supported by (and arguably identifies) one IDE.
That would be like regarding ‘C/C++’ as indicative of the popularity of C++ Builder.