Very sad. I was a Delphi developer for 14 years here. Was very happy with Turbo Pascal 7 and later Delphi, it was perfect and still haven't found a manual as h

Very sad. I was a Delphi developer for 14 years here. Was very happy with Turbo Pascal 7 and later Delphi, it was perfect and still haven't found a manual as helpful as the one at their IDE. Then it died. Was probably with this .NET bloat and then getting completely out of touch with their developer-base. Delphi built amazingly small executables and really good looking UI without much trouble for newbies, that you could escalate to highly complex software (I've even wrote a language compiler with Delphi). Even today, those smallish Delphi binaries built for Windows run surprisingly well under OSX and Linux through Wine. That's multi-platform right there. There was no need for the bloat or crazy licensing prices that pushed away the small developers, which in turn killed the popularity of Delphi. I'm a Java developer for 8 years now, it isn't perfect but sure is reachable for anyone and at least the code under a JVM will keep compiling without buying licenses.