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For some time, (mostly pirated copies of) Delphi were extremely popular in Russia. The fact that it's (Object) Pascal allowed lots of graduates, whose courses

For some time, (mostly pirated copies of) Delphi were extremely popular in Russia. The fact that it's (Object) Pascal allowed lots of graduates, whose courses were probably mostly taught in Pascal, to get to work fairly quickly. With that said, Delphi also had a reputation of a language with lots of bad code written in it, for the very same reason. People fresh from college or high school rarely write good code without mentors to point them in the right direction. I personally think that Object Pascal is deeply underappreciated. It's a simple but powerful language.

jchw 7y ago
I was pretty surprised, looking at Object Pascal, from the perspective of C++ development. Modern Delphi even offers generics and powerful macros, alongside the VCL. If Delphi had a better focus on cross-platform development I’d wager it’d probably be a lot more relevant today. FreePascal and Lazarus are also worth checking out, as they offer a similar UI library (LCL in Lazarus) and pretty good Object Pascal support (with minimal tweaks a lot of Delphi code works - I took a medium size program written for XE8 and had it working just fine with a little rejiggering.)
- Svip 7y ago
  The main reason for Object Pascal's downfall is the mismanagement by Borland and subsequently Embarcadero. It did not give a lot of people confidence when Borland sold it to a relatively unknown entity in 2008. And Embarcadero's immediately handling of Delphi did not help concerns either. But at that point, interest in Delphi was already declining, and neither Borland nor Embarcadero has figured out to bring back excitement. Delphi news occasionally appear on Hacker News, and people talk enthusiastically about it, but no one actually starts a new major product in Delphi following that.
  - tluyben2 7y ago
    It's incredibly expensive for something you cannot really seriously try out. I would want to try the full Architect edition at least for 3 months before deciding to buy it for that 'enterprise' price point and build anything in it that we would/could rely on. I think the price is the biggest burden though. They seem to not care about more people using it, so it's fine. It might make them enough as it is, but they should have a 'community version' (which should be at least the 'Enterprise' version) and then some saner pricing; I think it would get bums on seats. Not as many as it would've brought 15 years ago if they would've done that, but significantly more than now.
    - Svip 7y ago
      Frankly, and I know this is going to sound cynical, but I feel like their pricing model suggests that they have given up on getting new Delphi users, and only wish to milk the remaining Delphi customers for as long as they can.
      - tluyben2 7y ago
        I would agree with you there. Wonder how large the team is that still works on it (and maybe believes in it?).
- tluyben2 7y ago
  > If Delphi had a better focus on cross-platform development I’d wager it’d probably be a lot more relevant today. I thought they did do this? I never tried but I got a lot of emails about iOS & Android next to Desktop from them up until a few years ago when unsubscribed to their mailing list. Quick check; FireMonkey is apparently for writing cross platform apps on Android, iOS, Mac OS X, Linux & Windows. Or you mean; actual IDE on Mac & Linux? Indeed without that I wouldn't touch it either. I'd wager that if they did not do the 'interesting' pricing model, it'd be a lot more relevant. They should have free versions for open source / private use and 'sane' pricing for companies. They have none of that. E1700,- for the first year for 1 dev and if you want to build desktop apps for Linux it's more than double? Not a big deal for big corps, however, for anyone wanting to play around and write some small applications for their startup it makes no sense. > FreePascal and Lazarus are also worth checking out At least on Mac it is not very stable for me, I try it every year before christmas (when I have some time to test new things) and after 1-2 days I usually pass it on. From it actually not even starting (crashing on startup), to not compiling, to it just messing up the windows completely at random times... I hope they get it stable or that it is just me, because it would be great to have something like that for someone like me who made his first years of money creating products in Delphi (starting with 1 on 3.11) where Delphi was a secret weapon against people using C++.
  - Svip 7y ago
    > I thought they did do this? I never tried but I got a lot of emails about iOS & Android next to Desktop from them up until a few years ago when unsubscribed to their mailing list. Indeed they do, but that's assuming those cross-platform features are any good. No one I've heard of uses Delphi for Android and iOS development. As a Delphi house, when we actually needed to develop an Android app, we went with Java and Google's Android Studio, because Delphi's offering simply wasn't mature enough. Nor was it useful to use any advance third-party libraries in your app. Similarly, their MacOS and Linux offerings (not the IDE, because that's Windows only) aren't particularly good either. It's only really the Windows verion that gets official improvements, and FreePascal basically handles the Linux compiler. Which is fine, I guess. But it's rather a hassle to maintain a codebase for cross-platform clients, since you actually need to fiddle with your code between Delphi and FreePascal.

jchw 7y ago

I was pretty surprised, looking at Object Pascal, from the perspective of C++ development. Modern Delphi even offers generics and powerful macros, alongside the VCL. If Delphi had a better focus on cross-platform development I’d wager it’d probably be a lot more relevant today. FreePascal and Lazarus are also worth checking out, as they offer a similar UI library (LCL in Lazarus) and pretty good Object Pascal support (with minimal tweaks a lot of Delphi code works - I took a medium size program written for XE8 and had it working just fine with a little rejiggering.)

Svip 7y ago
The main reason for Object Pascal's downfall is the mismanagement by Borland and subsequently Embarcadero. It did not give a lot of people confidence when Borland sold it to a relatively unknown entity in 2008. And Embarcadero's immediately handling of Delphi did not help concerns either. But at that point, interest in Delphi was already declining, and neither Borland nor Embarcadero has figured out to bring back excitement. Delphi news occasionally appear on Hacker News, and people talk enthusiastically about it, but no one actually starts a new major product in Delphi following that.
- tluyben2 7y ago
  It's incredibly expensive for something you cannot really seriously try out. I would want to try the full Architect edition at least for 3 months before deciding to buy it for that 'enterprise' price point and build anything in it that we would/could rely on. I think the price is the biggest burden though. They seem to not care about more people using it, so it's fine. It might make them enough as it is, but they should have a 'community version' (which should be at least the 'Enterprise' version) and then some saner pricing; I think it would get bums on seats. Not as many as it would've brought 15 years ago if they would've done that, but significantly more than now.
  - Svip 7y ago
    Frankly, and I know this is going to sound cynical, but I feel like their pricing model suggests that they have given up on getting new Delphi users, and only wish to milk the remaining Delphi customers for as long as they can.
    - tluyben2 7y ago
      I would agree with you there. Wonder how large the team is that still works on it (and maybe believes in it?).
tluyben2 7y ago
> If Delphi had a better focus on cross-platform development I’d wager it’d probably be a lot more relevant today. I thought they did do this? I never tried but I got a lot of emails about iOS & Android next to Desktop from them up until a few years ago when unsubscribed to their mailing list. Quick check; FireMonkey is apparently for writing cross platform apps on Android, iOS, Mac OS X, Linux & Windows. Or you mean; actual IDE on Mac & Linux? Indeed without that I wouldn't touch it either. I'd wager that if they did not do the 'interesting' pricing model, it'd be a lot more relevant. They should have free versions for open source / private use and 'sane' pricing for companies. They have none of that. E1700,- for the first year for 1 dev and if you want to build desktop apps for Linux it's more than double? Not a big deal for big corps, however, for anyone wanting to play around and write some small applications for their startup it makes no sense. > FreePascal and Lazarus are also worth checking out At least on Mac it is not very stable for me, I try it every year before christmas (when I have some time to test new things) and after 1-2 days I usually pass it on. From it actually not even starting (crashing on startup), to not compiling, to it just messing up the windows completely at random times... I hope they get it stable or that it is just me, because it would be great to have something like that for someone like me who made his first years of money creating products in Delphi (starting with 1 on 3.11) where Delphi was a secret weapon against people using C++.
- Svip 7y ago
  > I thought they did do this? I never tried but I got a lot of emails about iOS & Android next to Desktop from them up until a few years ago when unsubscribed to their mailing list. Indeed they do, but that's assuming those cross-platform features are any good. No one I've heard of uses Delphi for Android and iOS development. As a Delphi house, when we actually needed to develop an Android app, we went with Java and Google's Android Studio, because Delphi's offering simply wasn't mature enough. Nor was it useful to use any advance third-party libraries in your app. Similarly, their MacOS and Linux offerings (not the IDE, because that's Windows only) aren't particularly good either. It's only really the Windows verion that gets official improvements, and FreePascal basically handles the Linux compiler. Which is fine, I guess. But it's rather a hassle to maintain a codebase for cross-platform clients, since you actually need to fiddle with your code between Delphi and FreePascal.