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Delphi/Pascal ran the call center telephony system at a company I worked at, and it ran it well. It was very performant and stable, and ran things for around 14

Delphi/Pascal ran the call center telephony system at a company I worked at, and it ran it well. It was very performant and stable, and ran things for around 14 years. Spent a while writing and modifying Delphi apps there, I really enjoyed it. I'm actually surprised it isn't used more today, it was definitely "rapid development" at the time. One thing it was great for was making small, dependency free executables. Similar to today's concept of "Microservices" we often wrote small executable services and applications for tasks and it was very straightforward and simple. You could whip something up in a couple hours that accomplished a lot. Push the .exe file somewhere, add it into the process and forget about it. Not surprised people are still out there using this stuff.

jetti 10y ago
> I'm actually surprised it isn't used more today, I'm not at all. Embarcadero has made Delphi a language that is out of reach of the beginner as their Delphi has been rediculously priced. Until recently they didn't have a free Delphi entry level product, it was $199 and was crippled. Now they at least have a free version but the cost has prevented me several times from actually learning Delphi. Now there is FreePascal but Lazarus just seemed clunky and I don't think it has as many bells and whistles as Delphi has.
- Jugurtha 10y ago
  >I'm not at all. Embarcadero has made Delphi a language that is out of reach of the beginner as their Delphi has been rediculously priced. Where I live, piracy is casual. People get software for free, and they stopped using Delphi because of Embarcadero. When people don't even deign to pirate your software, something's off. I think there are many who are still on Delphi 6 which is what I used when I was younger. It was simple, effective, tight. Then that Embarcadero thing came out.
  - jetti 10y ago
    I just think their marketing sucks and their IDE is nowhere near Visual Studio but the price points are nearly the same. Sure you get the VCL and other proprietary things (such as their fireman firemonkey app platform which deploys to android and iOS) but the cross platform tooling for .NET has gotten much better that C# makes more sense for many LOB applications than Delphi does.

jetti 10y ago

> I'm actually surprised it isn't used more today, I'm not at all. Embarcadero has made Delphi a language that is out of reach of the beginner as their Delphi has been rediculously priced. Until recently they didn't have a free Delphi entry level product, it was $199 and was crippled. Now they at least have a free version but the cost has prevented me several times from actually learning Delphi. Now there is FreePascal but Lazarus just seemed clunky and I don't think it has as many bells and whistles as Delphi has.

Jugurtha 10y ago
>I'm not at all. Embarcadero has made Delphi a language that is out of reach of the beginner as their Delphi has been rediculously priced. Where I live, piracy is casual. People get software for free, and they stopped using Delphi because of Embarcadero. When people don't even deign to pirate your software, something's off. I think there are many who are still on Delphi 6 which is what I used when I was younger. It was simple, effective, tight. Then that Embarcadero thing came out.
- jetti 10y ago
  I just think their marketing sucks and their IDE is nowhere near Visual Studio but the price points are nearly the same. Sure you get the VCL and other proprietary things (such as their fireman firemonkey app platform which deploys to android and iOS) but the cross platform tooling for .NET has gotten much better that C# makes more sense for many LOB applications than Delphi does.