22 ms·

22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

301 points by vs2 10y ago

raister 10y ago
It rocks to the point of server unavailability.
- candiodari 10y ago
  http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/2017-january-22years-delphi.html&gws_rd=cr&ei=ZEKkWJ6ZBcuH8wXO-L3wDQ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
  - macmac 10y ago
    Cache also appears dead.
    - PerryCox 10y ago
      archive.is has a cached copy from about an hour ago: http://archive.is/a4LOH http://archive.is/a4LOH
- marcocantu 10y ago
  Sorry about that, my blog is self-hosted and never gets much traffic -- roughly 100x general volume
  - bartread 10y ago
    Might be worth considering fronting it with something like Cloudflare. I pay them about £20/month and reckon I could handle 10k hits a day on a t2.micro instance in AWS (in reality I'm actually only getting about 10 - 20 visitors a day myself on the site in question, which I'm quite happy with at the moment due to reasons).
kweinber 10y ago
After the death of Python, Oracle and Delphi go really well together... give it a shot if you want to see the future. Edit: this is a historical reference... search for "Oracle Delphi Python"
- pryelluw 10y ago
  Missing /s tag? Im not sure if the comment is serious.
  - gilgoomesh 10y ago
    I think the comment is referring to Pythia, aka "the Oracle of Delphi", who could supposedly see the future: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythia
    - pryelluw 10y ago
      Ah I see. Its strange to see the word oracle here used in a positive way.
fredsted 10y ago
Sometimes I kind of miss Delphi 7. The way it makes it easy to create apps made programming so fun. Such a shame it went downhill after the .NET stuff.
- pboschmann 10y ago
  Oh yes, I absolutely loved the tinkering with Delphi and Kylix before I was a professional programmer. I remember Borland distributed Delphi6 for free for personal use and I had a lot of fun with it. In the end I landed a job as a web developer, worked in PSPad and left Delphi forgotten until the day — a decade or so later after I used Delphi the last time — I opened Eclipse the first time in my life. Never hated a tool, my profession and the IT industry more than at that moment… Why take the compilation so much time? Why are the fonts so ugly? Why does this tool needs more time at startup than the good old Delphi 6 on my 800 Mhz PC ten years ago? And why nobody seems to care about it?
  - nunobrito 10y ago
    Yep. I don't use Eclipse for these same reasons. It really seems someone hates IDE and we arrived on hell for paying back something we did in a past life. I switched to Netbeans. Slightly better: bigger icons, better looking UI. I like the key combinations there. Still nowhere good compared to Delphi IDE with useful code snippets built-in and easy-to-use creation of UI apps.
    - pboschmann 10y ago
      Netbeans is indeed better. Used it on some mid-size PHP projects and liked its neat UI and responsiveness. Nowadays I'm a happy IntelliJ user, but hope Netbeans will stay alive. It's definitely one of the better tools around and deserves a place under the shiny sun.
mrded 10y ago
Delphi 6 was my first one :)
binaryapparatus 10y ago
I am bit older than average so I used Delphi in its golden days. Even today few of the old customers need old apps maintained so I keep Delphi 7 ready. It _is_ great IDE/language.
- noir_lord 10y ago
  When it comes to quickly developing native line of business applications (the niche between excel spreadsheets and commercial off the shelf) I've still not seen anything that can beat Delphi, the .Net stuff has gotten very good.
- endorphone 10y ago
  Delphi is quite good, but I really truly think it killed a lot of careers: Many of the people that I worked with on a Delphi project late 90s/early 2000s just never let it go, and their job prospects collapsed to the last few residual shops still using Delphi. I suppose this happens with all technologies (e.g. some people clutch on and make Cobol their lifetime effort, etc), but every time I see a Delphi advocacy piece it makes me a little sad remembering the countless emails looking for possible Delphi engagements.
melling 10y ago
"Fastest compiler -- 85,000 lines per minute" What do you get 22 years later on an Intel i7?
- antaviana 10y ago
  On an AWS t2.medium instance, I get 2.5 seconds to compile and link 113,000 lines of code.
- Havoc 10y ago
  No idea but it was always stupidly fast. First time I used a C++ compiler I thought it had frozen because the hello world took so long to compile. The notion that something could compile for longer than a split second (for trivial things) didn't occur to me.
- vintagedave 10y ago
  You get a million lines of code in five seconds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq2mNUzcpE0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq2mNUzcpE0
- marcocantu 10y ago
  A million lines in 5 seconds, even if this is generated code: https://community.embarcadero.com/blogs/entry/compiling-a-million-lines-of-code-with-delphi https://community.embarcadero.com/blogs/entry/compiling-a-mi...
- fithisux 10y ago
  Delphi rocks, but nowadays Dlang has a place in my heart. Pascal seems to verbose.
madiathomas 10y ago
I was a Delphi Developer when I started developing software professionally. I loved programming in it. I jumped ship when Anders Hejlsberg, the Chief Architect of Delphi moved to Microsoft to be a lead architect of C#.NET. I used Delphi 6 and 7. When it was time to move to Delphi 8, Borland decided to target .NET. The choice was between learning Delphi 8 for .NET or learn Visual Studio .NET. I chose MS.NET because MS is the custodian of the .NET Framework. They are the ones on the driving seat, not Borland. Looking back, I don't regret the move because Delphi is dying. Posts requiring Delphi are nowhere to be seen on job sites in South Africa.
- eli 10y ago
  Same except after D7 I veered into web development with Coldfusion (I know how to pick a winner!) and then PHP. Ruby & Python much later. I didn't realize how good I had it with Delphi's IDE and interactive debugger.
avodonosov 10y ago
ah, Delphi...
aylons 10y ago
One of the first environments I ever programmed was Delphi. Had lots of fun with it, and it had a special place in my heart... Fast forward 20 years, and I'm a hardware developer using Altium a lot. As some here may be aware, Altium is a multi-gigabit piece of CAD/EDA behemoth written - and still maintained - in Delphi. 3D, DirectX, everything in Delphi. Just yesterday and today I had easily reproducible BSODs by using a very basic feature (routing nets). Memory leaks galore - most people I know have the habit of shutting Altium down now and then just to avoid a crash. Success is low - it crashes a lot, I'm getting tired of unhandled exceptions windows. And this way, I realize even great development tools age badly. Of course this is not all Delphi's fault, but it shows how tech is a Red Queen's race: you must run faster and faster to keep in the same place.
- noir_lord 10y ago
  I don't think that really says anything about Delphi and everything about the massive complexity of large software. I get regular crashes with a bunch of stuff (everything from Thunar (don't think that shows C has aged badly), Chrome (C++) and Intellij (Java).
  - tonyedgecombe 10y ago
    Some languages make it harder than others, there is a whole class of bugs that just disappear when you have garbage collection for instance.
    - noir_lord 10y ago
      I agree but a large program in one of those languages will still have more bugs than a small one, that's just the nature of things and the increase in bugs isn't linear either in my experience.
  - digler999 10y ago
    The thunar-crashing thing was introduced. A few years back it was stable, then sometime around a year or 2 ago it broke. Sad to see a good piece of software take a step back (proper testing should have prohibited that, shouldn't it ?).
acqq 10y ago
> I'll start blogging on the Delphi language coming back to Linux tomorrow! To taste the cross-platform IDE for Rapid Application Development today: http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ http://www.lazarus-ide.org/index.php?page=whyuse http://www.lazarus-ide.org/index.php?page=whyuse "Why use Lazarus? No dependencies! With Lazarus you can create programs which do not require any platform dependencies [1]. The result of it is the user of your program does not need to install any further packages, libraries or frameworks to run your software. [1] Linux/BSD applications may depend on GTK2 or alternatively QT. Some add-on packages may also add dependencies of their own Can be used in commercial projects Some IDEs restrict their license to only non-commercial development. Lazarus is GPL/LGPL [2][3] which permits using it in building commercial projects. [2] LGPL with additional permission to link libraries into your binaries. [3] Some additional packages come with various licenses such as GPL, MPL, ... "
- dvfjsdhgfv 10y ago
  I wish some company started promoting Lazarus. It's a great product and has a wonderful community, but the whole project somehow lacks enough traction to make it a serious alternative to more mainstream tools. I bet the moment a big player backs it up the attitude of developers will change. You can really produce prototypes of native apps rapidly.
- johnhattan 10y ago
  I'd also think "It's $1400 cheaper than Delphi" would be a good selling point. I started using Turbo Pascal in college when it was $49. Given that Embarcadero Delphi is competing with a lot of stuff that is free and high-quality, I doubt it's got anywhere to go but down from here.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    I payed around 100 € (direct conversion) for Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5, back in the day. One reason Borland lost us was when they decided to go after the enterprise market, with comparable prices.
julius 10y ago
I remember a tool called "Dirty Little Helper" (if I am not mistaken), which had all the Delphi answers, I would ask SO nowadays (eg. how to make a windows tray icon?) But it was an offline application.
mannykannot 10y ago
Verity Stob has chronicled the tribulations of Delphi enthusiasts in a series of commentaries: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/07/borland_ditches_delphi/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/07/borland_ditches_del... ... https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/20/verity_sons_of_khan_witch_of_wookey/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/20/verity_sons_of_khan...
Yuioup 10y ago
Delphi is dead. Nothing to see here. Move along.
interfixus 10y ago
A shocking aspect of Delphi 1 was the gargantuan executables it insisted on producing. There was much forum posting and gnashing of teeth. Hello World ran to about 100 kB. Funny thing is, I am just getting into Go, and you know what?
- eli 10y ago
  VB was worse if you included all the required DLLs.
- gressquel 10y ago
  I remember when we developed "remote administration tools" (trojans) we used Delphi but we made it as console application. The executables ended up on 15 kb for a full-featured RAT.
  - saganus 10y ago
    Ahhh... the memories. In the 90s I met this guy in IRC that used Delphi 2 to program a RAT called Hacker's Paradise. He was very kind with me (I was much younger than him apparently) and shared the source code so I could learn from it since I was constantly asking him programming stuff. Then later he renamed the tool "Master's Paradise" so he could go legit and sell it to companies and compete with MS BackOffice. I enjoyed talking with him so much, even though I could barely understand OOP, but the thought of talking to a real developet left me an impression
- jk4930 10y ago
  My first Hello World in Ada was 2.3 MB, but I'm sure it was the most safe and reliable Hello World in existence.
  - segmondy 10y ago
    I have no idea what you did, but I find that hard to believe, and this is with GNAT. I have a hello.adb program, 99bytes, compiled 25k -rwxrwxr-x 1 seg seg 25352 Nov 2 01:26 hello -rw-rw-r-- 1 seg seg 99 Nov 2 01:23 hello.adb -rw-rw-r-- 1 seg seg 1409 Nov 2 01:26 hello.ali -rw-rw-r-- 1 seg seg 1576 Nov 2 01:26 hello.o
ahacker15 10y ago
Delphi is still popular in the south of Brazil. It's dying, but slowly. There's a lot a legacy application written in Delphi here. Some old programmers, that only know to program in Delphi, may even build new apps with it. It may not be that modern today, but there's the "pay the bills" mindset. I think Delphi will die, but only because it costs a fortune today. If it had a resonable price, many people would continue to use it indeterminately.
- dvfjsdhgfv 10y ago
  > I think Delphi will die, but only because it costs a fortune today. I agree with your diagnosis. The problem is that Embarcadero doesn't understand that, and when it does (or when someone else buys Delphi), it may well be much too late to revive it. They could really position various versions of the product in a different way, making the lower tier more affordable.
  - tonyedgecombe 10y ago
    I think they do understand that, they just see their opportunity elsewhere. The reason is the only price that would satisfy the complainers is free, which isn't going to be very profitable. There is a community of locked in customers who are wiling to pay to keep their projects going, it makes sense for Embarcadero to milk them.
    - Karunamon 10y ago
      That market can only possibly be diminishing over time. I mean sure, $bigco can afford ~3k/user/year, but eventually, that's gonna dry up. Charging for basic development tools in 2017 just seems weird, and I'm afraid by the time they realize that the company is dying, the mindshare will be gone, never to return.
      - Joeri 10y ago
        There's no money in devtools for general desktop app development. Embarcadero knows that the only way to grow the delphi userbase is to make it free, so they're instead trying to milk it for all it's worth on the way down. I had a bit of hope for delphi with mobile app support, but the pricing really killed it now that microsoft offers xamarin for free. Plus, object pascal is too weird for js coders. C-style syntax is a must, even though object pascal is in many ways a better language.
silveira 10y ago
The documentation and help pages that came with Delphi were absolutely the best documentation I ever had. Every topic came with examples that you could copy and reuse. Not just snippets but fully functional blocks of code. It was brilliant.
- kozhevnikov 10y ago
  The Stack Overflow Driven Development (SODD) model.
- Elrac 10y ago
  You've reminded me of the reason I loved Delphi's help. I think what I found most helpful (and most unusual for the "state of the art") was that most help pages had "see also" links. This allowed me to look up something similar to what I needed and just follow the links to what I really wanted. I was able to use the Help pages as (almost?) my sole reference for the API. Something that just wasn't happening with Delphi's big competitor, VB.
- bencoder 10y ago
  That was pretty much how I learnt programming
- spiralx 10y ago
  Yes, I learnt Pascal from the Turbo Pascal docs and then moved onto Delphi from there.
johnny_reilly 10y ago
My first gig was writing telecoms software using Delphi 3. Good times! Then Inprise bought Borland and shipped a buggy version of Delphi 4 which was a pain. Like many others I jumped ship when I heard what Anders was doing with C#. I don't regret the move but I thought Delphi was great.
nnq 10y ago
Was wondering... is there any modern all-in-one RAD-tool nowadays? And if not... why? Has there ever stopped being a need for this?
- codewithcheese 10y ago
  Does Visual Studio count?
- giancarlostoro 10y ago
  Would Qt count in this? I've made some applications with Qt Creator, aside from not knowing much C++ they were built almost like I would expect in C# , Delphi and VB6. I think C# is the successor to Delphi today, and if Microsoft makes WinForms somehow cross platform and an official part of C# it would get very interesting. The guy in charge of C# at Microsoft made Turbo Pascal and worked on Delphi back in the day as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg
- nurettin 10y ago
  It's called Delphi XE (currently 10.2)
- zhte415 10y ago
  Half in jest and half seriousness... Excel fill this void for many many things corporate. Two decades later it is almost as good as Delphi was, just no .exe.
  - Havoc 10y ago
    Mind elaborating on this? I used Delphi for years, now I'm working in Excel all day and I can't quite see the parallel you're describing?
    - zhte415 10y ago
      Sure. What my former company called 'End User Computing'. This meant developing small or not-so-small programs in the only tool capable in a corporate environment: Excel (often linked to SharePoint as a data store). Otherwise lots of forms and procedures would have to be gone through making it a tech project. Background: Operations (not tech) mega-corporate bureaucracy where these apps were helpers. Solution: Open up Excel, and start to code and design GUIs on the worksheet via VBA built in to Excel (and all of Office). It was a stunningly similar experience to hazy memories of Delphi in terms of GUI and code, but ultimately was using a spanner to do a screwdriver's job. Memories of Delphi were certainly hazy at this point, but it was more similar than any other tools I'd used the the decade+ since that point.
yoodenvranx 10y ago
Delphi is still unrivaled when it comes to rapid GUI prototyping in combination with easy deployment. It's much easier than QT/GTK and you usually get a standalone .exe with no external dependencies. I really want to cry when I see the current alternatives... Node/Electron with dozens of MB of runtime and all that Javascript stuff? What went wrong that we end up with this?
- riledhel 10y ago
  And compile times were pretty fast too
  - yoodenvranx 10y ago
    I really want to see Delphi compile times on a modern i7 and a fast SSD. For small-ish projects that should be pretty much instantaneously.
    - tvmalsv 10y ago
      That is correct. My "apps" are really just small utilities, and the compile times are about 1s or a little less on my older i7 with spinning rust.
    - vintagedave 10y ago
      This video shows a million lines of code in five seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq2mNUzcpE0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq2mNUzcpE0
      - boznz 10y ago
        Just about sums up why I still use it if I want to get something done.
    - PeCaN 10y ago
      It's instantaneous for large projects. Literally I've compiled fairly large Delphi projects in the time it takes a Python interpreter to start.
masterponomo 10y ago
I attended a Clipper user group in Atlanta in the mid 1990's, with my dad. He was into Clipper, was trying to get me interested. The Clipper folks were also into Turbo Pascal. A Borland rep was there to give out swag and talk up the imminent release of Borland Delphi. The Clipper crowd was divided--some excited, some not so much. The older guys, like my dad, had come up programming with punched cards and tape drives. For them, a PC with Clipper and Turbo Pascal was plenty advanced enough for small business apps. Dad never did go for Delphi. 20+ years later, I'm doing a quick study of Object Pascal to prep for working on a legacy application at my work, in Delphi.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  You brought me back in time. Turbo Pascal 6.0/TASM for applications that required performance or system programming like, and Clipper Summer '87 (shortly replaced by the 5.0 OOP version) for database frontends.
- mike_hearn 10y ago
  Hah, that's how I started programming too. A bit of BASIC. Then I graduated to Clipper and Turbo Pascal because that's what my dad used. Then to Delphi 1.0, then 2.0, I think we skipped 3. Delphi 4 was a mess. Quality got pretty variable in the later releases. Imagine being 14 and trying to understand CORBA.
- mmargerum 10y ago
  I used Clipper back in the day. CA ruined it when they bought it. I was waiting for CA's new product "visual objects" in the meantime Delphi shipped and I've been using it since Delphi 1. I think it's unparalleled for building desktop applications for Mac and windows.
adam-falafel 10y ago
My first job out of college was as a tech support intern for Delphi, first answering pre-sales and installation calls, and eventually moving up to answering paid support calls. From there, I joined a consulting company and wrote and maintained LOB applications written in Delphi. Good times. Jumped ship to .NET in 2003.
barking 10y ago
Back then there was no internet and I knew no programmers. I remember seeing the yellow borland boxes at PC World and not really understanding what borland were. Afterwards I bought my first copy of vb secondhand (lots of manuals came with it), from someone who was getting into Delphi instead.
deleted 10y ago
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b4xt3em4n 10y ago
The best environment I've used to build software.
lunchladydoris 10y ago
I love the magazine scans. They're almost always a good reminder of how much things have changed, and how cheap things have become.
Havoc 10y ago
It's good for teaching purposes because it forces a very structured clear line of thinking. Not convinced it's still best as a practical language though.
- hsitz 10y ago
  I don't think many ever thought the language itself was ever "the best". It was the way the libraries and visual components (together, the "VCL") were designed, and the way things worked within the IDE, that many thought made Delphi the best. The Delphi/ObjectPascal language on its own, however, was pretty good.
  - Havoc 10y ago
    >It was the way the libraries and visual components (together, the "VCL") were designed Agreed. One thing that prevented me from loving python. The language was great...but how the fk do I get a clickable button without some mish-mash of half developed 3rd party libraries?
nottorp 10y ago
I can't help but notice that all the article talks about is Delphi versions up to 6... which is where it started to go downhill. Are recent versions of Delphi actually usable? I haven't tried anything beyond 8, and from my (admittedly rusty) experience the best version was 6.
- hsitz 10y ago
  Back in early 2000's when I used it a lot, the word was that the even numbered versions of Delphi (2, 4, 6) were all poor efforts, and the odd numbered (3,5,7) were all good. I used 6 and didn't think it was bad, but 7 was better. Many Delphi users had remained at version 5.
  - kol 10y ago
    6 and 7 were both great.
- TimJYoung 10y ago
  The latest Seattle and Berlin versions have pretty solid IDEs that start up very quickly and the runtime/VCL has seen a lot of improvements/fixes over the last few years.
pjmlp 10y ago
Delphi was a great environment, but Anders and other key persons leaving Borland, while the company lost track which customers they should target, besides the "clever" idea to change the company's name, killed it. I know of a few companies in Germany and Netherlands that still use it, but it is hard to get offers. And we had to wait 15 years until .NET started to offer a compilation model similar to Delphi (only for UWP apps). While Java kind of outsourced it to third party JDK vendors due to Sun's attitude against AOT compilation, oh well at least Java 9 will bring the first steps towards support it.
- agentgt 10y ago
  > While Java kind of outsourced it to third party JDK vendors due to Sun's attitude against AOT compilation, oh well at least Java 9 will bring the first steps towards support it. I'm just curious. How would AOT improve Java's ability to have better RAD. I guess I'm just missing the association. Is it bundling/distribution? Startup time? Integration with native libraries? I would imagine hot code swap probably doesn't work with AOT (aka JRebel) so that would hurt RAD.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Java has worse RAD support than Delphi, yet Delphi AOT compiles to native code. AOT compiling to native code, as standard option, would have improved Java's acceptance as safe language for desktop applications, due to better bundling, distribution and startup time. To the point that even Oracle does reckonize this, and is delivering an initial way of partially AOT compiling on GNU/Linux x64, with support for other platforms planned for Java 10. > I would imagine hot code swap probably doesn't work with AOT (aka JRebel) so that would hurt RAD. Sure it does, that can be done with dynamic libraries. Many game engines make use of this approach. Other environments like Eiffel and Lisp, have a set of JIT/AOT compilers, JIT during development and AOT for deployment.
vram22 10y ago
Somewhat long and interesting thread about Delphi from a while ago, on HN: Delphi – why won't it die? (2013) (stevepeacocke.blogspot.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613543 Did a search in hn.algolia.com just now to find the thread, and it was the top result when the setting was "By popularity": https://hn.algolia.com/?query=delphi&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=delphi&sort=byPopularity&prefi...
alex_duf 10y ago
I remember using Delphi 2 when I was younger, that's how I learned programming. If you don't mind hearing my personal story, keep reading, otherwise move on to another comment. By an interesting coincidence I was given a CD with tons of software on it, including Delphi 2. I started playing with it and quickly realised I could create my own programs using that tool. Later I went to the book store and found a book about it that I couldn't afford. So I came back every week to read as much as I could, then heading back home to try it on my illegal copy of Delphi. (I was 11) Then I realised there was a help manual embedded in the distribution, so I learned as much English as I could so I could understand that manual. Little by little I learned about conditions, loops, object programming and made a bunch of terribly crappy yet working games. No amount of studies could have taught me as much as I learned through using that software. No manual work could have given me the fun I had when programming my very own games. Reading "Delphi" as a headline on hacker news made me feel nostalgic and I figured I'd share my story here. So thanks Borland, the 11 year old me may not have paid to use that software, but it was enough of a revelation to make me the programmer I am today.
- mateuszf 10y ago
  Hey, it sounds very similar to how I learned programming. That's how I started too, apart from the fact that I had a simple Turbo Pascal book from the beginning, but I also learned writing programs using an illegal Delphi 2 CD.
- pmarreck 10y ago
  Nice! For me it was Microsoft BASIC on the early Macintosh and this magical book from 1985: https://smile.amazon.com/Macintosh-Midnight-Madness-Utilities-Diversions/dp/0914845306?sa-no-redirect=1 https://smile.amazon.com/Macintosh-Midnight-Madness-Utilitie... (Wow, I can't find the actual cover art anywhere! It was much cooler than what's shown there.)
  - svenfaw 10y ago
    http://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/161789449967-0-1/s-l1000.jpg http://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/161789449967-0-1/s-l1000.jpg
alsadi 10y ago
my favorite color is better than yours. Would someone please point to his/her blog saying that Tcl/tk being the universal scripting language?
- jacmoe 10y ago
  Do you know who Marco Cantu is? Apparently not. ;)
duracel 10y ago
Delphi was much more better choice than many others in 90's and early 2000. Fast compiler and quite optimised binaries also.
snarfy 10y ago
If I had to write a native COM application in Windows, I'd still use Delphi.
deleted 10y ago
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bigtunacan 10y ago
I never used Delphi, but I have a couple of friends that were die hard Delphi fanatics. Eventually they moved on to C# as all of the Delphi jobs dried up with Delphi's continually decreasing use. They still swore how they thought it was the best thing they ever worked with, but at the end of the day you have to pay the bills. Maybe it really is great, I don't know. I was a bit surprised looking at Tiobe (http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/) that they rank it as the 9th most popular language right now. Where is this actually being used? And the price tag is incredible!
- marcocantu 10y ago
  Delphi is used a lot, desktop has first class Win10 support (store included) and mobile clients are cross-platform. Also fast server code -- now coming to Linux. Skype for Windows is still written in Delphi! But I'm very biased
- VLM 10y ago
  I've seen it appear in bottom-up development areas. Top down would be the COBOL(s) of the 21st century that being Java or PHP/Javascript. Very little seems to come from non-software company megacorp enterprise HQ that isn't Java, PHP, or Javascript. The very bottom tier of bottom up development is making business critical systems depend on Excel and some impenetrable write only undebugable macros. The next tier up is where I've see Delphi apps mostly in sorta integrative and peculiar reporting roles. Oh and ETL of all places too. At least that's where I've seen it. It works well there, too.
- kol 10y ago
  It's used a lot since there are lots of legacy apps written in Delphi. You can't throw away hundreds of thousands or more lines of code just because Delphi "went out of fashion" (I know the situation is more complex than that, though).
- TimJYoung 10y ago
  When you're making half a million or more each year writing vertical market software, the price tag for a Delphi/RAD Studio license each year is irrelevant. This is especially true when Delphi was the reason why you're making all that money in the first place. It's kind of a "you had to have been there..." type of story, but if you get a chance, talk to a developer that was trying to create Windows applications for businesses back in the 90's and you will know what I mean. The really sad part is that while .NET and C# have done an okay job of providing a replacement (I think that MS has a hard time staying on-point when it comes to dev tools and make their tools too much of a moving target), you really cannot find anything exactly like Delphi/RAD Studio today. The primary reason why it's so sad is that Delphi created millions upon millions of dollars of revenue for independent software vendors all over the world, and you would think that companies would be trying to replicate that success. Alas, it's hard to contemplate even attempting such an endeavor when developer tools are not valued properly according to the money that they make the developer. If the software world finds a way to start making money from developer tools again, then you'll see another Delphi and it will be a lot cheaper.
codewritinfool 10y ago
As a pascal user since the early 80's, then an Object Pascal user, then a Delphi user since the first version, I love Delphi but to be honest I cannot afford the yearly updates. For someone that uses it for home projects, $916 for an upgrade is out of the question. Rambling here, but... Delphi 3/5/7 were incredible design packages. I feel they lost focus when they jumped on the .NET bandwagon - maybe it is just my perception, but maybe some of their internal developers were less focused on native code. Anders leaving was also a big hit. Kylix was yet another distraction.
- marcocantu 10y ago
  For home projects, the Starter edition is free.
  - Karunamon 10y ago
    Sure, if you don't want to build UWP apps, or 64 bit apps(!), or OSX apps... the list[1] goes on. [1]: https://www.embarcadero.com/docs/rad-studio-berlin-feature-matrix.pdf https://www.embarcadero.com/docs/rad-studio-berlin-feature-m...
- shakna 10y ago
  Lazarus [0] and FreePascal [1]? > Free Pascal tries to implement a Borland compatible pascal compiler on as many platforms as possible. [0] http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ [1] http://www.freepascal.org/ http://www.freepascal.org/
huan9huan 10y ago
After several years programming and using Borland, finally, I got to know what "Turbo" meaning (I am Chinese for not good in English)
tmsldd 10y ago
Thanks for making me feel so old... we had a programming lecture twice a week and I was carrying one of those 10 kg "Delphi The Bible" book in my backpacks... that made me feel like a programmer somehow.
jksmith 10y ago
I've written tons and tons of code in Delphi and remember it fondly. A few issues I had with it toward the end included Hjelsberg turning it into a kitchen sink, me too language, much like IMO the direction C# has gone in, and walking into projects with tons of business logic right behind the forms, empty except blocks, and codebase full of warnings when compiled. Fix your warnings people.
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
I got my start programming with Delphi 5. It was an excellent environment to learn in, since I could always see something happening based on what I had done. Better: the Delphi component libraries made writing a GUI application easy. I've never seen anything of their quality and ease up through today, and I still miss being able to get an application running by just subclassing some standard components and writing the core logic I needed.
reitanqild 10y ago
I guess I should have started on a greenfield project. For me it was less rosy. I remember my boss trying to get me started on Delphi. We basically had two or three Delphi developer workstations available because setting up one that could compile the projects we had in our vcs was a three day task - and it was only possible with the help of our resident Delphi consultant. Stuff like that has made me love Maven and Java. Same goes for Visual Basic that I once used to love. Still I feel I could have loved it if I didn't start with 10 years of accumulated references to unsupported packages. :-/
- Joeri 10y ago
  The way delphi finds its units is similar to how java finds its classes, so it can be smooth sailing or an absolute nightmare depending on how the project is laid out.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    Unlike how Java finds it classes I have clear memories about installing things that would update stuff in the registry.
analognoise 10y ago
Shout-out to Lazarus/FreePascal. It is like all the best parts of Delphi 5-7, and it is open source, free, and you can make commercial applications in it! I have started using it in earnest and it is wonderful - and a company can never take it away from you; there's no "we're shifting focus..." announcements. No paid support for broken updates. I honestly can't recommend it enough.
- ziotom78 10y ago
  I can confirm this. I have used it a couple of years ago for a GUI app I needed at work (1): Lazarus was a real time saver! When a colleague asked me if he could use my app under Windows, the porting process was 100% painless: all the code (~1000 lines of code) recompiled in an instant and the application worked like a charm. (1) https://github.com/ziotom78/hpview/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/ziotom78/hpview/blob/master/README.md
- boznz 10y ago
  +1 Amazing IDE and yes I have made a couple of commercial applications in it now :-)
- Animats 10y ago
  I just ported an old Pascal program to Free Pascal, and it went very well. It's a nice system.
- jug 10y ago
  Also FreePascal does dependency free compiles to a crapload of platforms. Crazy! So crazy this could be a use case by itself.
frik 10y ago
I started with QuickBasic/QBasic and Pascal. Though I went with VB4-6 instead of Delphi. It's sad that RAD isn't popular anymore. 1995 - 1999 was great with Win95 era, everything was so consistent, good documentation. Then Microsoft realised their "The Microsoft Network" lost against the open free WWW and then the announced dotNet (which took until 2003 for them to release v1) - that was the beginning of the end of the great Win32 platform and RAD. HTML with Frontpage and Dreamweaver was just an okay RAD andbthe situation got worse with "no tables, use div" and XHTML 1/2 movements.
- danarmak 10y ago
  RAD with WinForms was alive and well for many years after in the .Net era.
  - soundwave106 10y ago
    Very true, even now. The professional market for WinForms is probably dead, though. Yet ironically, I use Winforms in personal code way more today than any of Microsoft's other GUI technologies. Winforms is a great way to get a Windows app up extremely quickly that needed a simple GUI. There are plenty of ways to get a quick command line style app up, but I really don't know too many solutions that allow you to drag and drop functional GUIs as quickly as Winforms (other than VB and Delphi). For a fully fledged app, Winforms makes no sense to me these days. But Microsoft specific syntax like WPF or UWP no longer makes that much sense to me either. Might as well spend the time on HTML+CSS+Javascript and get cross-platform support...
mamcx 10y ago
I'm moderator in one of the oldest/largest delphi forum in latin-america: http://clubdelphi.com/ http://clubdelphi.com/ Ironically, I don't use Delphi anymore. Yet, I still help people with it and defend it when is possible. Delphi is amazing. It only have a HUGE problem: His owners. You can re4ad why Delphi fade away here: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Borland-fail?share=1 https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Borland-fail?share=1 "Borland lost its way when executive management decided to change the company to pursue a different market. ... ... In the height of the enterprise transformation, I asked Del Yocam, one of many interim CEOs after Kahn, "Are you saying you want to trade a million loyal $100 customers for a hundred $1 million customers?" Yocam replied without hesitation "Absolutely."
- kofejnik 10y ago
  yep, just checked, minimal useful Delphi license is ~$1500, which is a non-starter for most people outside of corporate environment consequently, you can never just pick it up and grow into it, you only learn it on the job which already uses it or maybe, you torrent it
  - vintagedave 10y ago
    There is a free version. Download Starter.
    - zeroc8 10y ago
      Can't do much with free. It's a waste of time. Give us some affordable professional options (i.e. Windows only professional for 300 bucks or so). Have a look at Jetbrains, they have figured it out.
- bsder 10y ago
  > In the height of the enterprise transformation, I asked Del Yocam, one of many interim CEOs after Kahn, "Are you saying you want to trade a million loyal $100 customers for a hundred $1 million customers?" Yocam replied without hesitation "Absolutely." And he is 100% correct. It's way easier to double the profit from 100 customers than it is 1 million.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
I was just having this conversation with an acquaintance about the software glut. When you do something well, you don't have to do it again, just enough to keep it compatible with the other things it needs to work with. So it takes a team of 50 people to make a product and then 10 people to maintain it forever. So where do those 40 people go? The latest answer has been annual licenses.
igivanov 10y ago
Hey Marco, I still have your Delphi 5 book :-) FWIIW, where I work, I started using Delphi 5 when it came out. As of now we have about a dozen D5 desktop applications all essential for the core business that are in active use and supported as necessary, running happily on Windows 10. I don't see why it won't continue like this for another 15 years... The bosses (who are non-programmers) don't really care that D5 is out of fashion - because it all just works (and rocks). The only reason I couldn't upgrade to a later version (Unicode is one thing that would be useful) is I am stuck with one critical and long discontinued grid component. Looking back I am not sure how we could have lived w/o Delphi. Well maybe it's an exaggeration, but certainly life would have been more difficult. Everything else from before .NET/C#/Windows Forms looks like a nightmare.
- kol 10y ago
  > I am stuck with one critical and long discontinued grid component Try to replace it with Virtual TreeView: http://www.jam-software.com/virtual-treeview/ http://www.jam-software.com/virtual-treeview/ https://github.com/Virtual-TreeView/Virtual-TreeView/ https://github.com/Virtual-TreeView/Virtual-TreeView/
  - igivanov 10y ago
    I know about this one and others, thanks. The problem is TopGrid, it is further customized, so flexible and so entrenched in my code that it would be an enormous undertaking to replace it. Even if UI was perfectly separated from the business logic, which it isn't :-)
    - Joeri 10y ago
      We ended up switching to cxGrid to move away from delphi 5. It does absolutely everything, but it can be hard to figure out how to configure it so it does exactly what you need it to.
brunock222 10y ago
12 years ago I did a rude system, part of it using Delphi 7. They still need, once every 6 months, to compile the EXE file with a small change. I get paid monthly just to press CTRL+F9 (generate new .EXE file) every 6 months, basically. I liiiike it :)
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krylon 10y ago
I've mentioned it before, but I'll repeat it. ;-) At work, I inherited maintenance of an in-house application a coworker that left the company wrote for our accounting department. In Delphi. When people speak highly of Delphi, they always mention how great the IDE is. Personally, I am not a big fan of IDEs. I was not disappointed, but my mainly, what I do is read and edit the source code. And I have to admit, that part was a pleasant surprise! I had never looked at or touched Pascal code before, but I was able to make a change to the source - and it worked, the very first time! - within a few days. And the majority of that time was spent figuring out how the code was structured[1] and what the accountants wanted me to do (they always talk to me as if I knew the first thing about accounting). But after that, it was smooth sailing. It sure helped that my predecessor wrote very readable code, but it seems that ObjectPascal made it very easy to write it that way. Or, more briefly: Happy Birthday! [1] The application is about a 10 KLOC in total, which is not small in my book, but not "very large", either. Also, I was both a developer and a sysadmin and a helpdesk monkey, so the phone was ringing about every fifteen minutes.
Joeri 10y ago
I learned VB3 at 13, and moved to delphi at 14. It was amazing. As easy as VB, but all the power of C++. I made my own DLL's to use in VB, just because I could. It was the coolest thing ever. Fast forward years later, and plenty of intermediate languages (C, C++, Java, ...) I got hired into my first professional software developer job ... as a delphi developer in a company with a big multi-million line delphi codebase they wanted to migrate to the web. I had done some web development, so I ended up writing features on both the delphi and web teams, often the same feature. So I became intimately familiar with the trade-offs of delphi vs web development. The thing about delphi: it was/is insanely productive. In the beginning it took about 3 to 5 times as long to write a comparable feature on the web side. It ended up driving me to research cutting edge web dev techniques to find some way to approach the productivity levels that delphi gave. In the end we almost got there, using rich frameworks and a component-driven UI. But to this day the delphi team can still get a feature done faster than the web team, and that's despite an IDE which is much weaker than webstorm/intellij. Object Pascal and the VCL are just that good. However, I wouldn't do a new project in Delphi. You're locked into an ever more expensive product with an uncertain future, and the productivity advantages just aren't worth it anymore. You can get close enough using an open source dev stack, and the value of having all your tools be open and free is significant.
fithisux 10y ago
People seem to forget that some Delphi libraries are intertwined with assembly and work around Delphi inefficiencies. This made some libraries very hard to port to FreePascal. A typical example is DevC++ and its dependencies.
pcunite 10y ago
Delphi 6 "Personal Edition" was my intro into Pascal. I absolutely loved it.
deleted 10y ago
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netrap 10y ago
Free Pascal/Lazarus is great. Glad they finally have Delphi Starter free but still it's not enough and the limits suck.
no_wizard 10y ago
Admittedly I haven't used Delphi but his reminds me of learning to program with realBASIC (Xojo). The book with the IDE was free and easy enough to comprehend and it introduced all the basics of OOP. Great times. I wonder if lots of people have had this same experience with VB .NET
jenkstom 10y ago
I too often see a fundamental misunderstanding of what made Delphi so great. Yes, you can drag and drop controls onto a form in a lot of tools. It can compile native code. And yes, Object Pascal was nice to read and maintain. But the real issue is rapid database applications. Being able to create business apps very rapidly was always Delphi's thing. It was a really fantastic replacement for Paradox and brought Turbo Pascal and Paradox together to create something amazing. For that there still isn't anything. There are a lot of things that are close, but nothing with the same level of power and speed. The closest thing I've found is Django. Hopefully that clarifies: it's not about GUI anything.
eggy 10y ago
I've used Lazarus and it's amazing, however I'm hoping Red lang becomes the new Delphi in a way.
mmgutz 10y ago
I remember Borland vs Ms Delphi vs VB TASM vs MASM Borland C++ OWL vs Microsfot C++/MFC Philippe Khan vs Gates Delphi was the raddest RAD tool. The free VCL components for it were often better than commercial VB ActiveX components. Delphi executables were faster. Delphi could statically link everything. I eventually had to move to VB when my Delphi job dried up. VB felt like a downgrade. I remember constantly referring to Dan Appleman's book so I could use Win32 APIs to work around the limitations of VB. I'm not knocking VB as it's one of my favorite tools too, but Delphi was the cream of the crop.
gerryk 10y ago
I used to code in Clipper in a past life. Many ex-Clipper devs became Delphi devs when the Great Fragmentation happened (multiple competing OO frameworks for Clipper).
orionblastar 10y ago
I learned UCSD Pascal on an Apple 2e, and then Turbo Pascal on an IBM PC XT in high school. 1984 to 1986. It helped me learn more languages like Ada, we had Janus Ada for DOS. Delphi 1.02 I got from some CD in a UK magazine sold in the USA. They gave away free copies of commerical software for buying the magazine for $10 or so. I did better in Visual Basic because I got jobs that required it.

301 points by vs2 10y ago

raister 10y ago

It rocks to the point of server unavailability.

candiodari 10y ago
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/2017-january-22years-delphi.html&gws_rd=cr&ei=ZEKkWJ6ZBcuH8wXO-L3wDQ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
- macmac 10y ago
  Cache also appears dead.
  - PerryCox 10y ago
    archive.is has a cached copy from about an hour ago: http://archive.is/a4LOH http://archive.is/a4LOH
marcocantu 10y ago
Sorry about that, my blog is self-hosted and never gets much traffic -- roughly 100x general volume
- bartread 10y ago
  Might be worth considering fronting it with something like Cloudflare. I pay them about £20/month and reckon I could handle 10k hits a day on a t2.micro instance in AWS (in reality I'm actually only getting about 10 - 20 visitors a day myself on the site in question, which I'm quite happy with at the moment due to reasons).

kweinber 10y ago

After the death of Python, Oracle and Delphi go really well together... give it a shot if you want to see the future. Edit: this is a historical reference... search for "Oracle Delphi Python"

pryelluw 10y ago
Missing /s tag? Im not sure if the comment is serious.
- gilgoomesh 10y ago
  I think the comment is referring to Pythia, aka "the Oracle of Delphi", who could supposedly see the future: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythia
  - pryelluw 10y ago
    Ah I see. Its strange to see the word oracle here used in a positive way.

fredsted 10y ago

Sometimes I kind of miss Delphi 7. The way it makes it easy to create apps made programming so fun. Such a shame it went downhill after the .NET stuff.

pboschmann 10y ago
Oh yes, I absolutely loved the tinkering with Delphi and Kylix before I was a professional programmer. I remember Borland distributed Delphi6 for free for personal use and I had a lot of fun with it. In the end I landed a job as a web developer, worked in PSPad and left Delphi forgotten until the day — a decade or so later after I used Delphi the last time — I opened Eclipse the first time in my life. Never hated a tool, my profession and the IT industry more than at that moment… Why take the compilation so much time? Why are the fonts so ugly? Why does this tool needs more time at startup than the good old Delphi 6 on my 800 Mhz PC ten years ago? And why nobody seems to care about it?
- nunobrito 10y ago
  Yep. I don't use Eclipse for these same reasons. It really seems someone hates IDE and we arrived on hell for paying back something we did in a past life. I switched to Netbeans. Slightly better: bigger icons, better looking UI. I like the key combinations there. Still nowhere good compared to Delphi IDE with useful code snippets built-in and easy-to-use creation of UI apps.
  - pboschmann 10y ago
    Netbeans is indeed better. Used it on some mid-size PHP projects and liked its neat UI and responsiveness. Nowadays I'm a happy IntelliJ user, but hope Netbeans will stay alive. It's definitely one of the better tools around and deserves a place under the shiny sun.

mrded 10y ago

Delphi 6 was my first one :)

binaryapparatus 10y ago

I am bit older than average so I used Delphi in its golden days. Even today few of the old customers need old apps maintained so I keep Delphi 7 ready. It _is_ great IDE/language.

noir_lord 10y ago
When it comes to quickly developing native line of business applications (the niche between excel spreadsheets and commercial off the shelf) I've still not seen anything that can beat Delphi, the .Net stuff has gotten very good.
endorphone 10y ago
Delphi is quite good, but I really truly think it killed a lot of careers: Many of the people that I worked with on a Delphi project late 90s/early 2000s just never let it go, and their job prospects collapsed to the last few residual shops still using Delphi. I suppose this happens with all technologies (e.g. some people clutch on and make Cobol their lifetime effort, etc), but every time I see a Delphi advocacy piece it makes me a little sad remembering the countless emails looking for possible Delphi engagements.

melling 10y ago

"Fastest compiler -- 85,000 lines per minute" What do you get 22 years later on an Intel i7?

antaviana 10y ago
On an AWS t2.medium instance, I get 2.5 seconds to compile and link 113,000 lines of code.
Havoc 10y ago
No idea but it was always stupidly fast. First time I used a C++ compiler I thought it had frozen because the hello world took so long to compile. The notion that something could compile for longer than a split second (for trivial things) didn't occur to me.
vintagedave 10y ago
You get a million lines of code in five seconds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq2mNUzcpE0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq2mNUzcpE0
marcocantu 10y ago
A million lines in 5 seconds, even if this is generated code: https://community.embarcadero.com/blogs/entry/compiling-a-million-lines-of-code-with-delphi https://community.embarcadero.com/blogs/entry/compiling-a-mi...
fithisux 10y ago
Delphi rocks, but nowadays Dlang has a place in my heart. Pascal seems to verbose.

madiathomas 10y ago

I was a Delphi Developer when I started developing software professionally. I loved programming in it. I jumped ship when Anders Hejlsberg, the Chief Architect of Delphi moved to Microsoft to be a lead architect of C#.NET. I used Delphi 6 and 7. When it was time to move to Delphi 8, Borland decided to target .NET. The choice was between learning Delphi 8 for .NET or learn Visual Studio .NET. I chose MS.NET because MS is the custodian of the .NET Framework. They are the ones on the driving seat, not Borland. Looking back, I don't regret the move because Delphi is dying. Posts requiring Delphi are nowhere to be seen on job sites in South Africa.

eli 10y ago
Same except after D7 I veered into web development with Coldfusion (I know how to pick a winner!) and then PHP. Ruby & Python much later. I didn't realize how good I had it with Delphi's IDE and interactive debugger.

avodonosov 10y ago

ah, Delphi...

aylons 10y ago

One of the first environments I ever programmed was Delphi. Had lots of fun with it, and it had a special place in my heart... Fast forward 20 years, and I'm a hardware developer using Altium a lot. As some here may be aware, Altium is a multi-gigabit piece of CAD/EDA behemoth written - and still maintained - in Delphi. 3D, DirectX, everything in Delphi. Just yesterday and today I had easily reproducible BSODs by using a very basic feature (routing nets). Memory leaks galore - most people I know have the habit of shutting Altium down now and then just to avoid a crash. Success is low - it crashes a lot, I'm getting tired of unhandled exceptions windows. And this way, I realize even great development tools age badly. Of course this is not all Delphi's fault, but it shows how tech is a Red Queen's race: you must run faster and faster to keep in the same place.

noir_lord 10y ago
I don't think that really says anything about Delphi and everything about the massive complexity of large software. I get regular crashes with a bunch of stuff (everything from Thunar (don't think that shows C has aged badly), Chrome (C++) and Intellij (Java).
- tonyedgecombe 10y ago
  Some languages make it harder than others, there is a whole class of bugs that just disappear when you have garbage collection for instance.
  - noir_lord 10y ago
    I agree but a large program in one of those languages will still have more bugs than a small one, that's just the nature of things and the increase in bugs isn't linear either in my experience.
- digler999 10y ago
  The thunar-crashing thing was introduced. A few years back it was stable, then sometime around a year or 2 ago it broke. Sad to see a good piece of software take a step back (proper testing should have prohibited that, shouldn't it ?).

acqq 10y ago

> I'll start blogging on the Delphi language coming back to Linux tomorrow! To taste the cross-platform IDE for Rapid Application Development today: http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ http://www.lazarus-ide.org/index.php?page=whyuse http://www.lazarus-ide.org/index.php?page=whyuse "Why use Lazarus? No dependencies! With Lazarus you can create programs which do not require any platform dependencies [1]. The result of it is the user of your program does not need to install any further packages, libraries or frameworks to run your software. [1] Linux/BSD applications may depend on GTK2 or alternatively QT. Some add-on packages may also add dependencies of their own Can be used in commercial projects Some IDEs restrict their license to only non-commercial development. Lazarus is GPL/LGPL [2][3] which permits using it in building commercial projects. [2] LGPL with additional permission to link libraries into your binaries. [3] Some additional packages come with various licenses such as GPL, MPL, ... "

dvfjsdhgfv 10y ago
I wish some company started promoting Lazarus. It's a great product and has a wonderful community, but the whole project somehow lacks enough traction to make it a serious alternative to more mainstream tools. I bet the moment a big player backs it up the attitude of developers will change. You can really produce prototypes of native apps rapidly.
johnhattan 10y ago
I'd also think "It's $1400 cheaper than Delphi" would be a good selling point. I started using Turbo Pascal in college when it was $49. Given that Embarcadero Delphi is competing with a lot of stuff that is free and high-quality, I doubt it's got anywhere to go but down from here.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  I payed around 100 € (direct conversion) for Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5, back in the day. One reason Borland lost us was when they decided to go after the enterprise market, with comparable prices.

julius 10y ago

I remember a tool called "Dirty Little Helper" (if I am not mistaken), which had all the Delphi answers, I would ask SO nowadays (eg. how to make a windows tray icon?) But it was an offline application.

mannykannot 10y ago

Verity Stob has chronicled the tribulations of Delphi enthusiasts in a series of commentaries: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/07/borland_ditches_delphi/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/07/borland_ditches_del... ... https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/20/verity_sons_of_khan_witch_of_wookey/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/20/verity_sons_of_khan...

Yuioup 10y ago

Delphi is dead. Nothing to see here. Move along.

interfixus 10y ago

A shocking aspect of Delphi 1 was the gargantuan executables it insisted on producing. There was much forum posting and gnashing of teeth. Hello World ran to about 100 kB. Funny thing is, I am just getting into Go, and you know what?

eli 10y ago
VB was worse if you included all the required DLLs.
gressquel 10y ago
I remember when we developed "remote administration tools" (trojans) we used Delphi but we made it as console application. The executables ended up on 15 kb for a full-featured RAT.
- saganus 10y ago
  Ahhh... the memories. In the 90s I met this guy in IRC that used Delphi 2 to program a RAT called Hacker's Paradise. He was very kind with me (I was much younger than him apparently) and shared the source code so I could learn from it since I was constantly asking him programming stuff. Then later he renamed the tool "Master's Paradise" so he could go legit and sell it to companies and compete with MS BackOffice. I enjoyed talking with him so much, even though I could barely understand OOP, but the thought of talking to a real developet left me an impression
jk4930 10y ago
My first Hello World in Ada was 2.3 MB, but I'm sure it was the most safe and reliable Hello World in existence.
- segmondy 10y ago
  I have no idea what you did, but I find that hard to believe, and this is with GNAT. I have a hello.adb program, 99bytes, compiled 25k -rwxrwxr-x 1 seg seg 25352 Nov 2 01:26 hello -rw-rw-r-- 1 seg seg 99 Nov 2 01:23 hello.adb -rw-rw-r-- 1 seg seg 1409 Nov 2 01:26 hello.ali -rw-rw-r-- 1 seg seg 1576 Nov 2 01:26 hello.o

ahacker15 10y ago

Delphi is still popular in the south of Brazil. It's dying, but slowly. There's a lot a legacy application written in Delphi here. Some old programmers, that only know to program in Delphi, may even build new apps with it. It may not be that modern today, but there's the "pay the bills" mindset. I think Delphi will die, but only because it costs a fortune today. If it had a resonable price, many people would continue to use it indeterminately.

dvfjsdhgfv 10y ago
> I think Delphi will die, but only because it costs a fortune today. I agree with your diagnosis. The problem is that Embarcadero doesn't understand that, and when it does (or when someone else buys Delphi), it may well be much too late to revive it. They could really position various versions of the product in a different way, making the lower tier more affordable.
- tonyedgecombe 10y ago
  I think they do understand that, they just see their opportunity elsewhere. The reason is the only price that would satisfy the complainers is free, which isn't going to be very profitable. There is a community of locked in customers who are wiling to pay to keep their projects going, it makes sense for Embarcadero to milk them.
  - Karunamon 10y ago
    That market can only possibly be diminishing over time. I mean sure, $bigco can afford ~3k/user/year, but eventually, that's gonna dry up. Charging for basic development tools in 2017 just seems weird, and I'm afraid by the time they realize that the company is dying, the mindshare will be gone, never to return.
    - Joeri 10y ago
      There's no money in devtools for general desktop app development. Embarcadero knows that the only way to grow the delphi userbase is to make it free, so they're instead trying to milk it for all it's worth on the way down. I had a bit of hope for delphi with mobile app support, but the pricing really killed it now that microsoft offers xamarin for free. Plus, object pascal is too weird for js coders. C-style syntax is a must, even though object pascal is in many ways a better language.

silveira 10y ago

The documentation and help pages that came with Delphi were absolutely the best documentation I ever had. Every topic came with examples that you could copy and reuse. Not just snippets but fully functional blocks of code. It was brilliant.

kozhevnikov 10y ago
The Stack Overflow Driven Development (SODD) model.
Elrac 10y ago
You've reminded me of the reason I loved Delphi's help. I think what I found most helpful (and most unusual for the "state of the art") was that most help pages had "see also" links. This allowed me to look up something similar to what I needed and just follow the links to what I really wanted. I was able to use the Help pages as (almost?) my sole reference for the API. Something that just wasn't happening with Delphi's big competitor, VB.
bencoder 10y ago
That was pretty much how I learnt programming
spiralx 10y ago
Yes, I learnt Pascal from the Turbo Pascal docs and then moved onto Delphi from there.

johnny_reilly 10y ago

My first gig was writing telecoms software using Delphi 3. Good times! Then Inprise bought Borland and shipped a buggy version of Delphi 4 which was a pain. Like many others I jumped ship when I heard what Anders was doing with C#. I don't regret the move but I thought Delphi was great.

nnq 10y ago

Was wondering... is there any modern all-in-one RAD-tool nowadays? And if not... why? Has there ever stopped being a need for this?

codewithcheese 10y ago
Does Visual Studio count?
giancarlostoro 10y ago
Would Qt count in this? I've made some applications with Qt Creator, aside from not knowing much C++ they were built almost like I would expect in C# , Delphi and VB6. I think C# is the successor to Delphi today, and if Microsoft makes WinForms somehow cross platform and an official part of C# it would get very interesting. The guy in charge of C# at Microsoft made Turbo Pascal and worked on Delphi back in the day as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg
nurettin 10y ago
It's called Delphi XE (currently 10.2)
zhte415 10y ago
Half in jest and half seriousness... Excel fill this void for many many things corporate. Two decades later it is almost as good as Delphi was, just no .exe.
- Havoc 10y ago
  Mind elaborating on this? I used Delphi for years, now I'm working in Excel all day and I can't quite see the parallel you're describing?
  - zhte415 10y ago
    Sure. What my former company called 'End User Computing'. This meant developing small or not-so-small programs in the only tool capable in a corporate environment: Excel (often linked to SharePoint as a data store). Otherwise lots of forms and procedures would have to be gone through making it a tech project. Background: Operations (not tech) mega-corporate bureaucracy where these apps were helpers. Solution: Open up Excel, and start to code and design GUIs on the worksheet via VBA built in to Excel (and all of Office). It was a stunningly similar experience to hazy memories of Delphi in terms of GUI and code, but ultimately was using a spanner to do a screwdriver's job. Memories of Delphi were certainly hazy at this point, but it was more similar than any other tools I'd used the the decade+ since that point.

yoodenvranx 10y ago

Delphi is still unrivaled when it comes to rapid GUI prototyping in combination with easy deployment. It's much easier than QT/GTK and you usually get a standalone .exe with no external dependencies. I really want to cry when I see the current alternatives... Node/Electron with dozens of MB of runtime and all that Javascript stuff? What went wrong that we end up with this?

riledhel 10y ago
And compile times were pretty fast too
- yoodenvranx 10y ago
  I really want to see Delphi compile times on a modern i7 and a fast SSD. For small-ish projects that should be pretty much instantaneously.
  - tvmalsv 10y ago
    That is correct. My "apps" are really just small utilities, and the compile times are about 1s or a little less on my older i7 with spinning rust.
  - vintagedave 10y ago
    This video shows a million lines of code in five seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq2mNUzcpE0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq2mNUzcpE0
    - boznz 10y ago
      Just about sums up why I still use it if I want to get something done.
  - PeCaN 10y ago
    It's instantaneous for large projects. Literally I've compiled fairly large Delphi projects in the time it takes a Python interpreter to start.

masterponomo 10y ago

I attended a Clipper user group in Atlanta in the mid 1990's, with my dad. He was into Clipper, was trying to get me interested. The Clipper folks were also into Turbo Pascal. A Borland rep was there to give out swag and talk up the imminent release of Borland Delphi. The Clipper crowd was divided--some excited, some not so much. The older guys, like my dad, had come up programming with punched cards and tape drives. For them, a PC with Clipper and Turbo Pascal was plenty advanced enough for small business apps. Dad never did go for Delphi. 20+ years later, I'm doing a quick study of Object Pascal to prep for working on a legacy application at my work, in Delphi.

pjmlp 10y ago
You brought me back in time. Turbo Pascal 6.0/TASM for applications that required performance or system programming like, and Clipper Summer '87 (shortly replaced by the 5.0 OOP version) for database frontends.
mike_hearn 10y ago
Hah, that's how I started programming too. A bit of BASIC. Then I graduated to Clipper and Turbo Pascal because that's what my dad used. Then to Delphi 1.0, then 2.0, I think we skipped 3. Delphi 4 was a mess. Quality got pretty variable in the later releases. Imagine being 14 and trying to understand CORBA.
mmargerum 10y ago
I used Clipper back in the day. CA ruined it when they bought it. I was waiting for CA's new product "visual objects" in the meantime Delphi shipped and I've been using it since Delphi 1. I think it's unparalleled for building desktop applications for Mac and windows.

adam-falafel 10y ago

My first job out of college was as a tech support intern for Delphi, first answering pre-sales and installation calls, and eventually moving up to answering paid support calls. From there, I joined a consulting company and wrote and maintained LOB applications written in Delphi. Good times. Jumped ship to .NET in 2003.

barking 10y ago

Back then there was no internet and I knew no programmers. I remember seeing the yellow borland boxes at PC World and not really understanding what borland were. Afterwards I bought my first copy of vb secondhand (lots of manuals came with it), from someone who was getting into Delphi instead.

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b4xt3em4n 10y ago

The best environment I've used to build software.

lunchladydoris 10y ago

I love the magazine scans. They're almost always a good reminder of how much things have changed, and how cheap things have become.

Havoc 10y ago

It's good for teaching purposes because it forces a very structured clear line of thinking. Not convinced it's still best as a practical language though.

hsitz 10y ago
I don't think many ever thought the language itself was ever "the best". It was the way the libraries and visual components (together, the "VCL") were designed, and the way things worked within the IDE, that many thought made Delphi the best. The Delphi/ObjectPascal language on its own, however, was pretty good.
- Havoc 10y ago
  >It was the way the libraries and visual components (together, the "VCL") were designed Agreed. One thing that prevented me from loving python. The language was great...but how the fk do I get a clickable button without some mish-mash of half developed 3rd party libraries?

nottorp 10y ago

I can't help but notice that all the article talks about is Delphi versions up to 6... which is where it started to go downhill. Are recent versions of Delphi actually usable? I haven't tried anything beyond 8, and from my (admittedly rusty) experience the best version was 6.

hsitz 10y ago
Back in early 2000's when I used it a lot, the word was that the even numbered versions of Delphi (2, 4, 6) were all poor efforts, and the odd numbered (3,5,7) were all good. I used 6 and didn't think it was bad, but 7 was better. Many Delphi users had remained at version 5.
- kol 10y ago
  6 and 7 were both great.
TimJYoung 10y ago
The latest Seattle and Berlin versions have pretty solid IDEs that start up very quickly and the runtime/VCL has seen a lot of improvements/fixes over the last few years.

pjmlp 10y ago

Delphi was a great environment, but Anders and other key persons leaving Borland, while the company lost track which customers they should target, besides the "clever" idea to change the company's name, killed it. I know of a few companies in Germany and Netherlands that still use it, but it is hard to get offers. And we had to wait 15 years until .NET started to offer a compilation model similar to Delphi (only for UWP apps). While Java kind of outsourced it to third party JDK vendors due to Sun's attitude against AOT compilation, oh well at least Java 9 will bring the first steps towards support it.

agentgt 10y ago
> While Java kind of outsourced it to third party JDK vendors due to Sun's attitude against AOT compilation, oh well at least Java 9 will bring the first steps towards support it. I'm just curious. How would AOT improve Java's ability to have better RAD. I guess I'm just missing the association. Is it bundling/distribution? Startup time? Integration with native libraries? I would imagine hot code swap probably doesn't work with AOT (aka JRebel) so that would hurt RAD.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Java has worse RAD support than Delphi, yet Delphi AOT compiles to native code. AOT compiling to native code, as standard option, would have improved Java's acceptance as safe language for desktop applications, due to better bundling, distribution and startup time. To the point that even Oracle does reckonize this, and is delivering an initial way of partially AOT compiling on GNU/Linux x64, with support for other platforms planned for Java 10. > I would imagine hot code swap probably doesn't work with AOT (aka JRebel) so that would hurt RAD. Sure it does, that can be done with dynamic libraries. Many game engines make use of this approach. Other environments like Eiffel and Lisp, have a set of JIT/AOT compilers, JIT during development and AOT for deployment.

vram22 10y ago

Somewhat long and interesting thread about Delphi from a while ago, on HN: Delphi – why won't it die? (2013) (stevepeacocke.blogspot.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613543 Did a search in hn.algolia.com just now to find the thread, and it was the top result when the setting was "By popularity": https://hn.algolia.com/?query=delphi&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=delphi&sort=byPopularity&prefi...

alex_duf 10y ago

I remember using Delphi 2 when I was younger, that's how I learned programming. If you don't mind hearing my personal story, keep reading, otherwise move on to another comment. By an interesting coincidence I was given a CD with tons of software on it, including Delphi 2. I started playing with it and quickly realised I could create my own programs using that tool. Later I went to the book store and found a book about it that I couldn't afford. So I came back every week to read as much as I could, then heading back home to try it on my illegal copy of Delphi. (I was 11) Then I realised there was a help manual embedded in the distribution, so I learned as much English as I could so I could understand that manual. Little by little I learned about conditions, loops, object programming and made a bunch of terribly crappy yet working games. No amount of studies could have taught me as much as I learned through using that software. No manual work could have given me the fun I had when programming my very own games. Reading "Delphi" as a headline on hacker news made me feel nostalgic and I figured I'd share my story here. So thanks Borland, the 11 year old me may not have paid to use that software, but it was enough of a revelation to make me the programmer I am today.

mateuszf 10y ago
Hey, it sounds very similar to how I learned programming. That's how I started too, apart from the fact that I had a simple Turbo Pascal book from the beginning, but I also learned writing programs using an illegal Delphi 2 CD.
pmarreck 10y ago
Nice! For me it was Microsoft BASIC on the early Macintosh and this magical book from 1985: https://smile.amazon.com/Macintosh-Midnight-Madness-Utilities-Diversions/dp/0914845306?sa-no-redirect=1 https://smile.amazon.com/Macintosh-Midnight-Madness-Utilitie... (Wow, I can't find the actual cover art anywhere! It was much cooler than what's shown there.)
- svenfaw 10y ago
  http://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/161789449967-0-1/s-l1000.jpg http://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/161789449967-0-1/s-l1000.jpg

alsadi 10y ago

my favorite color is better than yours. Would someone please point to his/her blog saying that Tcl/tk being the universal scripting language?

jacmoe 10y ago
Do you know who Marco Cantu is? Apparently not. ;)

duracel 10y ago

Delphi was much more better choice than many others in 90's and early 2000. Fast compiler and quite optimised binaries also.

snarfy 10y ago

If I had to write a native COM application in Windows, I'd still use Delphi.

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bigtunacan 10y ago

I never used Delphi, but I have a couple of friends that were die hard Delphi fanatics. Eventually they moved on to C# as all of the Delphi jobs dried up with Delphi's continually decreasing use. They still swore how they thought it was the best thing they ever worked with, but at the end of the day you have to pay the bills. Maybe it really is great, I don't know. I was a bit surprised looking at Tiobe (http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/) that they rank it as the 9th most popular language right now. Where is this actually being used? And the price tag is incredible!

marcocantu 10y ago
Delphi is used a lot, desktop has first class Win10 support (store included) and mobile clients are cross-platform. Also fast server code -- now coming to Linux. Skype for Windows is still written in Delphi! But I'm very biased
VLM 10y ago
I've seen it appear in bottom-up development areas. Top down would be the COBOL(s) of the 21st century that being Java or PHP/Javascript. Very little seems to come from non-software company megacorp enterprise HQ that isn't Java, PHP, or Javascript. The very bottom tier of bottom up development is making business critical systems depend on Excel and some impenetrable write only undebugable macros. The next tier up is where I've see Delphi apps mostly in sorta integrative and peculiar reporting roles. Oh and ETL of all places too. At least that's where I've seen it. It works well there, too.
kol 10y ago
It's used a lot since there are lots of legacy apps written in Delphi. You can't throw away hundreds of thousands or more lines of code just because Delphi "went out of fashion" (I know the situation is more complex than that, though).
TimJYoung 10y ago
When you're making half a million or more each year writing vertical market software, the price tag for a Delphi/RAD Studio license each year is irrelevant. This is especially true when Delphi was the reason why you're making all that money in the first place. It's kind of a "you had to have been there..." type of story, but if you get a chance, talk to a developer that was trying to create Windows applications for businesses back in the 90's and you will know what I mean. The really sad part is that while .NET and C# have done an okay job of providing a replacement (I think that MS has a hard time staying on-point when it comes to dev tools and make their tools too much of a moving target), you really cannot find anything exactly like Delphi/RAD Studio today. The primary reason why it's so sad is that Delphi created millions upon millions of dollars of revenue for independent software vendors all over the world, and you would think that companies would be trying to replicate that success. Alas, it's hard to contemplate even attempting such an endeavor when developer tools are not valued properly according to the money that they make the developer. If the software world finds a way to start making money from developer tools again, then you'll see another Delphi and it will be a lot cheaper.

codewritinfool 10y ago

As a pascal user since the early 80's, then an Object Pascal user, then a Delphi user since the first version, I love Delphi but to be honest I cannot afford the yearly updates. For someone that uses it for home projects, $916 for an upgrade is out of the question. Rambling here, but... Delphi 3/5/7 were incredible design packages. I feel they lost focus when they jumped on the .NET bandwagon - maybe it is just my perception, but maybe some of their internal developers were less focused on native code. Anders leaving was also a big hit. Kylix was yet another distraction.

marcocantu 10y ago
For home projects, the Starter edition is free.
- Karunamon 10y ago
  Sure, if you don't want to build UWP apps, or 64 bit apps(!), or OSX apps... the list[1] goes on. [1]: https://www.embarcadero.com/docs/rad-studio-berlin-feature-matrix.pdf https://www.embarcadero.com/docs/rad-studio-berlin-feature-m...
shakna 10y ago
Lazarus [0] and FreePascal [1]? > Free Pascal tries to implement a Borland compatible pascal compiler on as many platforms as possible. [0] http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ [1] http://www.freepascal.org/ http://www.freepascal.org/

huan9huan 10y ago

After several years programming and using Borland, finally, I got to know what "Turbo" meaning (I am Chinese for not good in English)

tmsldd 10y ago

Thanks for making me feel so old... we had a programming lecture twice a week and I was carrying one of those 10 kg "Delphi The Bible" book in my backpacks... that made me feel like a programmer somehow.

jksmith 10y ago

I've written tons and tons of code in Delphi and remember it fondly. A few issues I had with it toward the end included Hjelsberg turning it into a kitchen sink, me too language, much like IMO the direction C# has gone in, and walking into projects with tons of business logic right behind the forms, empty except blocks, and codebase full of warnings when compiled. Fix your warnings people.

eli_gottlieb 10y ago

I got my start programming with Delphi 5. It was an excellent environment to learn in, since I could always see something happening based on what I had done. Better: the Delphi component libraries made writing a GUI application easy. I've never seen anything of their quality and ease up through today, and I still miss being able to get an application running by just subclassing some standard components and writing the core logic I needed.

reitanqild 10y ago

I guess I should have started on a greenfield project. For me it was less rosy. I remember my boss trying to get me started on Delphi. We basically had two or three Delphi developer workstations available because setting up one that could compile the projects we had in our vcs was a three day task - and it was only possible with the help of our resident Delphi consultant. Stuff like that has made me love Maven and Java. Same goes for Visual Basic that I once used to love. Still I feel I could have loved it if I didn't start with 10 years of accumulated references to unsupported packages. :-/

Joeri 10y ago
The way delphi finds its units is similar to how java finds its classes, so it can be smooth sailing or an absolute nightmare depending on how the project is laid out.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Unlike how Java finds it classes I have clear memories about installing things that would update stuff in the registry.

analognoise 10y ago

Shout-out to Lazarus/FreePascal. It is like all the best parts of Delphi 5-7, and it is open source, free, and you can make commercial applications in it! I have started using it in earnest and it is wonderful - and a company can never take it away from you; there's no "we're shifting focus..." announcements. No paid support for broken updates. I honestly can't recommend it enough.

ziotom78 10y ago
I can confirm this. I have used it a couple of years ago for a GUI app I needed at work (1): Lazarus was a real time saver! When a colleague asked me if he could use my app under Windows, the porting process was 100% painless: all the code (~1000 lines of code) recompiled in an instant and the application worked like a charm. (1) https://github.com/ziotom78/hpview/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/ziotom78/hpview/blob/master/README.md
boznz 10y ago
+1 Amazing IDE and yes I have made a couple of commercial applications in it now :-)
Animats 10y ago
I just ported an old Pascal program to Free Pascal, and it went very well. It's a nice system.
jug 10y ago
Also FreePascal does dependency free compiles to a crapload of platforms. Crazy! So crazy this could be a use case by itself.

frik 10y ago

I started with QuickBasic/QBasic and Pascal. Though I went with VB4-6 instead of Delphi. It's sad that RAD isn't popular anymore. 1995 - 1999 was great with Win95 era, everything was so consistent, good documentation. Then Microsoft realised their "The Microsoft Network" lost against the open free WWW and then the announced dotNet (which took until 2003 for them to release v1) - that was the beginning of the end of the great Win32 platform and RAD. HTML with Frontpage and Dreamweaver was just an okay RAD andbthe situation got worse with "no tables, use div" and XHTML 1/2 movements.

danarmak 10y ago
RAD with WinForms was alive and well for many years after in the .Net era.
- soundwave106 10y ago
  Very true, even now. The professional market for WinForms is probably dead, though. Yet ironically, I use Winforms in personal code way more today than any of Microsoft's other GUI technologies. Winforms is a great way to get a Windows app up extremely quickly that needed a simple GUI. There are plenty of ways to get a quick command line style app up, but I really don't know too many solutions that allow you to drag and drop functional GUIs as quickly as Winforms (other than VB and Delphi). For a fully fledged app, Winforms makes no sense to me these days. But Microsoft specific syntax like WPF or UWP no longer makes that much sense to me either. Might as well spend the time on HTML+CSS+Javascript and get cross-platform support...

mamcx 10y ago

I'm moderator in one of the oldest/largest delphi forum in latin-america: http://clubdelphi.com/ http://clubdelphi.com/ Ironically, I don't use Delphi anymore. Yet, I still help people with it and defend it when is possible. Delphi is amazing. It only have a HUGE problem: His owners. You can re4ad why Delphi fade away here: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Borland-fail?share=1 https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Borland-fail?share=1 "Borland lost its way when executive management decided to change the company to pursue a different market. ... ... In the height of the enterprise transformation, I asked Del Yocam, one of many interim CEOs after Kahn, "Are you saying you want to trade a million loyal $100 customers for a hundred $1 million customers?" Yocam replied without hesitation "Absolutely."

kofejnik 10y ago
yep, just checked, minimal useful Delphi license is ~$1500, which is a non-starter for most people outside of corporate environment consequently, you can never just pick it up and grow into it, you only learn it on the job which already uses it or maybe, you torrent it
- vintagedave 10y ago
  There is a free version. Download Starter.
  - zeroc8 10y ago
    Can't do much with free. It's a waste of time. Give us some affordable professional options (i.e. Windows only professional for 300 bucks or so). Have a look at Jetbrains, they have figured it out.
bsder 10y ago
> In the height of the enterprise transformation, I asked Del Yocam, one of many interim CEOs after Kahn, "Are you saying you want to trade a million loyal $100 customers for a hundred $1 million customers?" Yocam replied without hesitation "Absolutely." And he is 100% correct. It's way easier to double the profit from 100 customers than it is 1 million.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

I was just having this conversation with an acquaintance about the software glut. When you do something well, you don't have to do it again, just enough to keep it compatible with the other things it needs to work with. So it takes a team of 50 people to make a product and then 10 people to maintain it forever. So where do those 40 people go? The latest answer has been annual licenses.

igivanov 10y ago

Hey Marco, I still have your Delphi 5 book :-) FWIIW, where I work, I started using Delphi 5 when it came out. As of now we have about a dozen D5 desktop applications all essential for the core business that are in active use and supported as necessary, running happily on Windows 10. I don't see why it won't continue like this for another 15 years... The bosses (who are non-programmers) don't really care that D5 is out of fashion - because it all just works (and rocks). The only reason I couldn't upgrade to a later version (Unicode is one thing that would be useful) is I am stuck with one critical and long discontinued grid component. Looking back I am not sure how we could have lived w/o Delphi. Well maybe it's an exaggeration, but certainly life would have been more difficult. Everything else from before .NET/C#/Windows Forms looks like a nightmare.

kol 10y ago
> I am stuck with one critical and long discontinued grid component Try to replace it with Virtual TreeView: http://www.jam-software.com/virtual-treeview/ http://www.jam-software.com/virtual-treeview/ https://github.com/Virtual-TreeView/Virtual-TreeView/ https://github.com/Virtual-TreeView/Virtual-TreeView/
- igivanov 10y ago
  I know about this one and others, thanks. The problem is TopGrid, it is further customized, so flexible and so entrenched in my code that it would be an enormous undertaking to replace it. Even if UI was perfectly separated from the business logic, which it isn't :-)
  - Joeri 10y ago
    We ended up switching to cxGrid to move away from delphi 5. It does absolutely everything, but it can be hard to figure out how to configure it so it does exactly what you need it to.

brunock222 10y ago

12 years ago I did a rude system, part of it using Delphi 7. They still need, once every 6 months, to compile the EXE file with a small change. I get paid monthly just to press CTRL+F9 (generate new .EXE file) every 6 months, basically. I liiiike it :)

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krylon 10y ago

I've mentioned it before, but I'll repeat it. ;-) At work, I inherited maintenance of an in-house application a coworker that left the company wrote for our accounting department. In Delphi. When people speak highly of Delphi, they always mention how great the IDE is. Personally, I am not a big fan of IDEs. I was not disappointed, but my mainly, what I do is read and edit the source code. And I have to admit, that part was a pleasant surprise! I had never looked at or touched Pascal code before, but I was able to make a change to the source - and it worked, the very first time! - within a few days. And the majority of that time was spent figuring out how the code was structured[1] and what the accountants wanted me to do (they always talk to me as if I knew the first thing about accounting). But after that, it was smooth sailing. It sure helped that my predecessor wrote very readable code, but it seems that ObjectPascal made it very easy to write it that way. Or, more briefly: Happy Birthday! [1] The application is about a 10 KLOC in total, which is not small in my book, but not "very large", either. Also, I was both a developer and a sysadmin and a helpdesk monkey, so the phone was ringing about every fifteen minutes.

Joeri 10y ago

I learned VB3 at 13, and moved to delphi at 14. It was amazing. As easy as VB, but all the power of C++. I made my own DLL's to use in VB, just because I could. It was the coolest thing ever. Fast forward years later, and plenty of intermediate languages (C, C++, Java, ...) I got hired into my first professional software developer job ... as a delphi developer in a company with a big multi-million line delphi codebase they wanted to migrate to the web. I had done some web development, so I ended up writing features on both the delphi and web teams, often the same feature. So I became intimately familiar with the trade-offs of delphi vs web development. The thing about delphi: it was/is insanely productive. In the beginning it took about 3 to 5 times as long to write a comparable feature on the web side. It ended up driving me to research cutting edge web dev techniques to find some way to approach the productivity levels that delphi gave. In the end we almost got there, using rich frameworks and a component-driven UI. But to this day the delphi team can still get a feature done faster than the web team, and that's despite an IDE which is much weaker than webstorm/intellij. Object Pascal and the VCL are just that good. However, I wouldn't do a new project in Delphi. You're locked into an ever more expensive product with an uncertain future, and the productivity advantages just aren't worth it anymore. You can get close enough using an open source dev stack, and the value of having all your tools be open and free is significant.

fithisux 10y ago

People seem to forget that some Delphi libraries are intertwined with assembly and work around Delphi inefficiencies. This made some libraries very hard to port to FreePascal. A typical example is DevC++ and its dependencies.

pcunite 10y ago

Delphi 6 "Personal Edition" was my intro into Pascal. I absolutely loved it.

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netrap 10y ago

Free Pascal/Lazarus is great. Glad they finally have Delphi Starter free but still it's not enough and the limits suck.

no_wizard 10y ago

Admittedly I haven't used Delphi but his reminds me of learning to program with realBASIC (Xojo). The book with the IDE was free and easy enough to comprehend and it introduced all the basics of OOP. Great times. I wonder if lots of people have had this same experience with VB .NET

jenkstom 10y ago

I too often see a fundamental misunderstanding of what made Delphi so great. Yes, you can drag and drop controls onto a form in a lot of tools. It can compile native code. And yes, Object Pascal was nice to read and maintain. But the real issue is rapid database applications. Being able to create business apps very rapidly was always Delphi's thing. It was a really fantastic replacement for Paradox and brought Turbo Pascal and Paradox together to create something amazing. For that there still isn't anything. There are a lot of things that are close, but nothing with the same level of power and speed. The closest thing I've found is Django. Hopefully that clarifies: it's not about GUI anything.

eggy 10y ago

I've used Lazarus and it's amazing, however I'm hoping Red lang becomes the new Delphi in a way.

mmgutz 10y ago

I remember Borland vs Ms Delphi vs VB TASM vs MASM Borland C++ OWL vs Microsfot C++/MFC Philippe Khan vs Gates Delphi was the raddest RAD tool. The free VCL components for it were often better than commercial VB ActiveX components. Delphi executables were faster. Delphi could statically link everything. I eventually had to move to VB when my Delphi job dried up. VB felt like a downgrade. I remember constantly referring to Dan Appleman's book so I could use Win32 APIs to work around the limitations of VB. I'm not knocking VB as it's one of my favorite tools too, but Delphi was the cream of the crop.

gerryk 10y ago

I used to code in Clipper in a past life. Many ex-Clipper devs became Delphi devs when the Great Fragmentation happened (multiple competing OO frameworks for Clipper).

orionblastar 10y ago

I learned UCSD Pascal on an Apple 2e, and then Turbo Pascal on an IBM PC XT in high school. 1984 to 1986. It helped me learn more languages like Ada, we had Janus Ada for DOS. Delphi 1.02 I got from some CD in a UK magazine sold in the USA. They gave away free copies of commerical software for buying the magazine for $10 or so. I did better in Visual Basic because I got jobs that required it.