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Ask HN: What Happened to Borland?

213 points by tiffanyh 5y ago

I recall early in my software development career Borland have a strong hold in the developer tool space (and largely loved by developers). What happened to them? They were the “JetBrains” of their day.

eatonphil 5y ago
Similarly, I'm trying to find high-quality retrospectives on Pascal vs C. (I'm still trying to understand today if there is good reason [other than Lazarus and GUI programming] to use FreePascal over C or C++.) Any links you know of are welcome!
- mikewarot 5y ago
  The main issue is (and always has been, in my opinion) that "Standard" pascal sucks in that it doesn't have standard libraries, and thus all of them were just a little too different from each other. Delphi (and Lazarus/Free Pascal) have a largely compatible and sane set of libraries that include quite sane string handling (you never allocate or deallocate them, the have length, and can contain nulls without issue) The latest versions of things include generics, so you can make lists, trees, etc of your defined record type with little to no trouble. Separate compilation of Units means that I almost never wait for a compile... it is always sub-second from hitting F9, to seeing the thing run. The two-way tools to edit forms are one of the most productive I've ever seen. Borland C++ built a lot of boilerplate to make up for the C++ impedance match with their VCL libraries, that you couldn't tinker with, or things broke. Delphi/Lazarus don't have that issue. Lazarus doesn't support GIT integration directly, yet, as far as I know. If you are doing personal projects, there's no reason not to use it.
  - bnastic 5y ago
    Iirc, Borland literally had to add closures to C++ to make their C++ Builder work and be as simple as Delphi in the UI editor.
- wirrbel 5y ago
  A random comment won't qualify as high-quality but I have a fond relationship with Pascal, since I learnt programming with a Turbo Pascal book that was on the shelf in my local library and since Turbo Pascal gave weird error messages (due to clock speeds as it turns out), I found Freepascal that I could get from the internet via dial-up connection. FreePascal's Object Pascal is is a nice language, pascal alone gives you an environment similar to C, with Object Pascal you get some polymorphism (classes and methods). What's of course missing in comparison to C++ is templates, so as soon as you build containers you will find yourself casting again. If you want to have a slightly-more-high-level language than C, it may work out. Especially the Unit-System allows for better modularisation and definitely is an improvement over include-headers. For most applications nowadays I would like to have a GC in place, which kind of makes me wonder whether Modula/oberon would be the more natural choices nowadays for choosing a pascal-esque language. But then I quickly end up picking SML/ocaml because once you have a GC, you quickly want a couple of other niceties unless you really want to have a bare-metal language.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  I'm thinking, perhaps the non-visual bits of the LCL: Data modules, and everything you can place on them. The (Borland-clone) data set abstractions and swappable "drivers" still make database-centric apps a joy to develop (IMO, from what little I've tested it).
wizzerking 5y ago
The firebird database engine is open source, but came from Borland Interbase http://mc-computing.com/Databases/Firebird/index.html http://mc-computing.com/Databases/Firebird/index.html
eli 5y ago
I think competing directly against Microsoft in the 90s was pretty tough, even if you were largely loved by developers
markus_zhang 5y ago
I believe most of the cream moved away to other companies (e.g. to Microsoft). The company itself was merged into Micro Focus a few years ago.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  Micro Focus is a seriously weird company. I'd love to know what their story is. They just seem to acquire defunct software companies. The only company that I know they sold again is SuSE. Everything else is just merged into Micro Focus. We never hear from the hordes for developer that presumable works there, nor do anyone claim to be using their products. It's just a black hole for aging, failing software companies.
  - ahartmetz 5y ago
    Legacy software really is their stated core business. Maybe that is why they sold Suse again.
    - akyoan 5y ago
      We found who's maintaining all of this COBOL code after all. They must have a lot of legacy-systems developers and can probably market themselves for expensive consultancy.
  - blihp 5y ago
    They're using the age old 'roll up' strategy: buy a bunch of past their prime products/companies with an installed base, bean count them to profitability and then milk them dry. This tends to work pretty well with enterprise customers who will pay obscene amounts of money for years/decades to maintain the status quo. Once products/companies enter these roll up black holes, they are rarely heard from again by anyone other than legacy customers.
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    Their website seems to advertise the fact that they are in some the "top 9/10 investment companies, 10/10 telecommunications, 10/10 pharmaceuticals, 10/10 aerospace and defense companies." Not sure how they define topness, but maybe they've made a business out of buying up companies with lots of contracts in risk-averse fields and doing maintenance/collecting renewal fees?
dr_kiszonka 5y ago
Wikipedia has some information about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland#The_1990s:_Rise_and_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland#The_1990s:_Rise_and_ch...
stickac 5y ago
This might provide some hints (or not): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg#At_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg#At_Microsoft "In 1996, Hejlsberg left Borland and joined Microsoft. One of his first achievements was the J++ programming language and the Windows Foundation Classes; he also became a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and Technical Fellow. Since 2000, he has been the lead architect of the team developing the C# language. In 2012 Hejlsberg announced a new Microsoft project, TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript." I can only speculate that lots of skilled Borland developers followed Hejlsberg and participated in creation of C# and later TypeScript.
- andrei_says_ 5y ago
  What incredible impact.
  - vrodic 5y ago
    Still Delphi was better. - DSL for UI (Forms) - fast native compiler that produced self sufficient binaries - great component library and many open source libraries - Object Pascal was extended to fit perfectly the needs of UI programming
    - nawgz 5y ago
      Building things that have no real-world constraints does often result in great beauty. Unfortunately, the web and all its ugliness became the dominant platform because it enabled no-download no-install information & application interaction
      - cosmodisk 5y ago
        It was probably 20 or so years ago when I played for some time with Delphi. It was extraordinary easy to make program interfaces. Fast forward to today and we are in this clusterfuck, where everyone keeps reinventing the wheel and complexities just keep growing.
fooqux 5y ago
Man, this reminds me of how much I loved Borland's OWL in school. When I entered the workforce, I was forced to use MFC and I was probably the worst kind of coworker to be around at that time.
- zwieback 5y ago
  Boy, forgot about OWL, I loved that. I remember the reworked version without the custom C++ language extension for event handlers wasn't quite as magical.
- pantulis 5y ago
  Turbo Vision libraries for DOS where an absolute delight. And I clearly remember a Turbo Pascal demo with a breakout game clone that was a lesson on object oriented development.
  - dugmartin 5y ago
    I made a good bit of money in undergrad and grad school building software in Turbo Vision in the early 90s. The biggest project was writing all the software included with this college textbook: https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/quality-control-0135011159 https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/quality-cont.... I found out later that the software in that book ended up being used in industry, including Jim Beam (the whiskey brand) using it in their distillery.
tpmx 5y ago
Why did Borland fail? (quora.com) - June 13, 2015, 263 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9712267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9712267
- ChrisArchitect 5y ago
  Good. Yes, earlier this year someone shared it again and the post from a former QA Engineer at Borland jumped out. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26018033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26018033
codr7 5y ago
Death by bean counting and enterprise bs, that's what happened. I spent 13 years writing Object Pascal in Delphi full time, starting from Delphi 4 and ending right about where Embarcadero entered the scene. They seriously dropped the ball by focusing on ticking enterprise boxes and charging insane amounts for it rather than evolving and fixing stuff.
- speed_spread 5y ago
  Yep, they brutally tried to trade community goodwill for enterpris-ey contracts and quickly lost both.
- pantulis 5y ago
  I mean, they even had their own CORBA broker!
  - stickfigure 5y ago
    Unpopular opinion: CORBA was underrated. For its time, CORBA was a decent way of stitching together heterogeneous systems. Tediously hand-coding REST APIs was a big step backwards, and gRPC is really just catching up to where we were before.
    - poulsbohemian 5y ago
      Thank you!! I did my undergrad thesis around CORBA (showing my age…) and you are spot on that the whole world proceeded to pile on a whole lot of work in order to make everything run over http.
    - scrumper 5y ago
      I remember learning about CORBA in undergrad too. Then a few months into my first job, "new guy, go do this integration with SOAP/WSDL." Crushed me so hard I went into sales.
      - AnotherGoodName 5y ago
rswskg 5y ago
First tool I ever used for converting class diagrams to code. Felt pretty cool!
acheron 5y ago
The same thing that happened to Lotus and WordPerfect: Microsoft drove them out of business.
- thrower123 5y ago
  What happened to Lotus is really just sad. Selling out to IBM, who sucked every dime out, then tossing off the desiccated husk to HCL to keep it on life support and crank out an enterprise security patch from time to time.
  - fred96 5y ago
    I 100% agree. I was a Notes Evangelist for + 20 years. Now I'm using Nextcloud and hope it will have a long and good life.
- fred96 5y ago
  Lotus was not really killed by Microsoft but by IBM...
- teh_klev 5y ago
  Factually not true. I suggest you grab a copy of "In Search of Stupidity by Merrill Chapman": https://www.amazon.co.uk/Search-Stupidity-Twenty-Marketing-Disasters/dp/1590597214 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Search-Stupidity-Twenty-Marketing-D... Most of these companies from the 80's and 90's foot gunned themselves into oblivion or were bought by companies that ruined their products.
  - petilon 5y ago
    > Factually not true. No one who was active in the computer industry in the 90s will say that. Don't care what that book says.
    - teh_klev 5y ago
      I've been active in the computer industry as a professional since the mid 80's and can tell you that most of these companies screwed themselves up through complacency, idiotic business decisions and being acquired by larger players that ballsed up their products. Their products got worse, releases delayed etc etc. I can cite one of many concrete examples which is Ashton Tate. Some young upstart with a compiler called Clipper by a company called Nantucket came and ate their lunch because dBase IV was a pile of crap. Sadly Nantuck got bought out by CA and that was the death knell. Microsoft didn't kill Clipper, CA did. Sure in the 90's (late) Microsoft may have been a ruthless operator and stole many and various cheeses, but they were low hanging fruits (apologies for the mixed metaphors) and you can't blame Gate's and co for taking advantage of idiotic commercial choices made by people who were asleep at the wheel. Sure Microsoft have abused their monopoly position during the browser wars but when it came to the old school productivity suites these older companies just weren't agile enough to protect their positions. But don't let facts get in the way of a chance to bash Microsoft. Read that book, I'll even buy you a copy.
ransom1538 5y ago
"Apparently, JBuiler used to be their #1 cash cow. Well, until Eclipse came along: within 18 months, JBuilder license sales dropped to essentially zero." quoting from a previous employee.
- speed_spread 5y ago
  It might have saved them to go with the JetBrains model of a free "Community" edition along with paid supported options but that's probably not a jump that the uninspired management would have been willing to make.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    They did, later... Too late :-(
- rstupek 5y ago
  We used jbuilder and it was a great product, simpler to use than eclipse but it's hard to compete with free and good enough
  - ransom1538 5y ago
    Yeah as a kid i remember staring at the jbuilder box in a "computer store". I wanted it so bad. But never had the money.
  - lowbloodsugar 5y ago
    Yet JetBrains survives.
    - johannes1234321 5y ago
      Which is fascinating to watch. As it is quite uncommon in today's world.
    - The_Colonel 5y ago
      That's an understatement. JetBrains has a strong continual growth.
mistrial9 5y ago
I specifically recall Microsoft engineering in the 1990 era, driving up to Borland headquarters in Scotts Valley en masse in expensive cars, and inviting engineers out for lunch "on them". It was a calculated PR and intimidation move by someone at Microsoft to acquire talent and to destroy Borland. Borland and its quirky leader were well regarded in Silicon Valley by many engineers, while Microsoft was busy making a reputation as scorched-earth competitors. It seemed that it was not enough to win a market segment for Microsoft, there was a clear signal of destroying competing companies, and Borland was one of them at the top of the list, based on this event.
- chihuahua 5y ago
  Is there something wrong with hiring engineers from a competitor? Should they have had a no-poaching agreement like Apple and Google had a few years ago? That was deemed illegal if I remember correctly.
  - Kranar 5y ago
    In and of itself no, but courts have ruled that there's a distinction between hiring people to make use of their talent vs. hiring people to deny said talent to the competition. Was Microsoft targeting Borland employees because Microsoft was looking to make use of their talent for their own products; that's legitimate. However, if Microsoft was hiring Borland employees for the purpose of keeping those employees from working at Borland; that's potentially predatory and violates antitrust laws. Note that it's not even in the employee's best interest in the case of predatory hiring. Much like with predatory pricing, once Borland goes out of business as a result of said practice, Microsoft is unlikely to continue retaining many of those employees or paying lucrative salaries and the overall pool of talent as well as salaries is likely to shrink in the long run. It's the nature of predatory actions that they hurt the actor in the short run but benefit them in the long run whereas the public gains in the short run but is damaged in the long run.
    - thunkshift1 5y ago
      Hmmm.. this seems like a very grey area in hiring practices and competition. Almost impossible to do anything about it… sucks for small companies.
marcodiego 5y ago
Microsoft bought their brains: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/borland-sues-microsoft-over-brain-drain/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/borland-sues...
MichaelMoser123 5y ago
maybe not directly related to the question, this project makes vim look like TurboC, the author mentions, that he has configuration that does so. https://github.com/skywind3000/vim-quickui https://github.com/skywind3000/vim-quickui
mschaef 5y ago
I can think of several things that may have contributed. In no particular order. * Their application business lost out to Microsoft many times over the years. (Sidekick, Quattro, Sprint, etc.) * The availability of free and open source development tools went way up. (This undermined the ability to make money selling development tools, even as they become more expensive to develop.) * They lost Anders Hejlsberg to Microsoft. (His Microsoft resume is a testimonial to his skills, technical and otherwise, but prior to that he was the driving force for the Turbo Pascal line through Delphi. They did diversify, but Turbo Pascal really was Borland's core asset.) * Developer mindshare pivoted away from client apps to web apps.
- varjag 5y ago
  It was also very distinctly DOS/Windows-first product family. Microsoft OS slide to irrelevance sealed the fate.
  - akyoan 5y ago
    > Microsoft OS slide to irrelevance I wouldn't call 75% of desktop share "irrelevant". Tablets are still 20 times less common than PCs. * * data from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...
    - novok 5y ago
      What happened is the web replaced most native desktop apps, not mobile tablet UIs. There is a reason why web devs are the still the most common type of devs, despite mobile devices being the most common type of device used today by a large mile.
    - varjag 5y ago
      Doesn't matter what you run your browser in. The lion's share of job market for developers is distinctly not Windows native applications.
    - fourthark 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
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wonderwonder 5y ago
I used to love working with Borland C++ Builder many moons ago.
- shimonabi 5y ago
  I'm working with it at my job. I't called Embarcadero now. They name their versions after world city names.
fiedzia 5y ago
Several things happened at the same time: 1. At peak popularity, Borland products where easily available. Borland decided to turn to enterprise and raised the price considerably, so individuals and small companies started looking elsewhere. By the time they realised the mistake it was too late. In my opinion this was the biggest mistake. 2. Internet and Linux came, and with them Perl, PHP, Python and others. Borland missed the boat, and again by the time they realised that, it was too late. 3. Sun came with Java and Microsoft with C#, both seen as the future of enterprise, and available for free or at very low cost. Java was extremely popular at education sector, pushing out Pascal and other competitors. Both made Object Pascal obsolete. So bad decisions and being late to the party. Also it was hard to compete with Microsoft in the long term. As an unrelated sidenote, at the time when world was turning towards agile, they were building and marketing software for managing waterfall project management. That just shows how disconnected from reality of their customers they were.
- thomascgalvin 5y ago
  > At peak popularity, Borland products where easily available. Borland decided to turn to enterprise and raised the price considerably, so individuals and small companies started looking elsewhere There is a lot to be said for being easy to get and affordable. I gladly give IntelliJ a couple of hundred dollars a year, because $10-$20 a month for a superior developer experience is worth it to me. If I was paying their enterprise rate, though ... not a chance.
  - Pxtl 5y ago
    On the other hand the "we're professional products, you'll eat the cost and like it" approach worked fine for Adobe.
    - mh- 5y ago
      A staggering percentage of Adobe installations in the 90s were pirated, even in the US.
      - 5y ago
throwaway47292 5y ago
I really dont know what happened, but borland c++ 3.1 was the very best IDE I have ever used, no amount of emacs can replace it in my heart. Delphi was super good as well. We have only gone backwards since those days..
- agumonkey 5y ago
  hey apparently someone made a dosbox distro to play with borland c++ https://developerinsider.co/download-turbo-c-for-windows-7-8-8-1-and-windows-10-32-64-bit-full-screen/amp/ https://developerinsider.co/download-turbo-c-for-windows-7-8...
  - markus_zhang 5y ago
    I'm wondering if it's possible to retain the editor but use modern toolchain such as GCC? I guess it's definitely possible but how can I achieve that from WITHIN the editor?
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      that's the whole issue, people mentioned borland c++ 3 being nicer than emacs, until you need to tweak it :)
      - markus_zhang 5y ago
        Agreed, we need an editor that is as flexible as possible. From that perspective VSCode serves a pretty good middle ground. It's programmable (but in Typescript that I don't like) and has tons of plugins, but it also has nice GUIs and such.
- satisfice 5y ago
  We used 3.1 as our internal benchmark of quality.
AnotherGoodName 5y ago
They never really made the jump to Windows did they? I know they had Windows IDEs but lets be honest, just like Wordstar, Lotus 123 and a bunch of others they were way too slow to move to Windows in the industry shake up that was Windows 95.
- mikewarot 5y ago
  Delphi was by far the most productive programming environment available for Windows, right up until the bean counters took over, and they started raising the prices out of the reach of casual developers. You can do things in Lazarus (the open source IDE based on Free Pascal) in minutes that take far, far too long to fiddle with in Python/WxBuilder, for example. I wasted weeks of time trying to use a "more modern" platform.
- johannes1234321 5y ago
  Delphi was a leading develment tool for Windows in that era.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  Nope, you've got it totally wrong. From the introduction of Delphi 1 for Windows 3.x in 1995, they were huge on Windows.
GartzenDeHaes 5y ago
I'm not sure how much of a factor this was, but Microsoft kept making changes to their Windows header files that broke Borland's tooling.
ctdonath 5y ago
Borland logo was prominently displayed on a high-profile building in Atlanta until a few years ago. Surprised they lasted so long.
grlass 5y ago
I started software dev in the mid-2010s, and had never heard of Borland, until I heard a former colleague mention it having great built-in debugging tools and that they missed it. Same colleague had some vocal criticism of `gdb` as a debugging tool, and the state of Linux-based debugging tools as a whole, with claims that "Borland's were much better, and Visual Studio (not VS Code) being one of the few development environments with a quality debugger". I'm not sure how fair that assessment is, I've found `gdb` to be a helpful tool, though I've never used Visual Studio.
- __d 5y ago
  You should try the Visual Studio debugger one day. It's kinda the yardstick for graphical debuggers. gdb is a fine tool, but I think the VS debugger is reasonably described as "next level". Many people don't know about Microsoft's other debugger, WinDbg. It's actually more capable than the VS debugger, but the UI is closer to that of gdb.
  - grlass 5y ago
    I would be keen to try, but afaik there's no way to do it on Linux which is my main dev/deploy environment. It feels like Linux debugging is stuck in a viscous cycle, since few people are putting the capital into a decent debugger UI, and thus few people are using debugging UIs (and thus using printf debugging, or gdb CLI). Folk might not realise how much better it could be.
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  It’s night and day. The debuggers in those two tools were very easy to use, very visual, but surprisingly powerful. I cry a little on the inside when I see developers using Visual Studio and resorting to printf statements (or the equivalent) because they’ve never even tried to use the debugger, ever.
- nrdvana 5y ago
  I'd say Delphi was one notch better than Visual Studio. The pascal language was more highly optimized and easier to parse, so the debugger was much snappier about popping up the tooltips to show you values of variables or F1 to jump into the help pages. I remember being especially disappointed with VS because they would spend hundreds of MB of your precious disk space installing the entire Microsoft Knowledge Base, and the hitting F1 on a code statement would bring up a mishmash of Visual Basic examples (while developing C++) for almost but not the right class. In Delphi, it always knew exactly what class you were dealing with and would open the correct help page before your finger was fully off of the function key. The help pages had been expertly written to show you the most important details first, and were easy to browse. Really, I'm surprised I don't see more people reminiscing about those help files. There was probably as much effort put into that as into the frameworks or compiler or IDE.
wkandek 5y ago
I don't know what happened to Borland. In 1982ish in Germany I was programming my Apple II in Applesoft Basic and UCSD Pascal. UCSD was 3 floppies, I had a 2 floppy system so for certain steps one had to physically swap floppies. I attended an Apple User Group In Frankfurt and somebody demo'ed Turbo Pascal 1.0 on their Apple with the Z80 add-in soft card under CP/M. Everybody was amazed with the speed and integration. I bought a copy on the spot, received it maybe 3 months later as it had to shipped from the US. By that time it was on version 2.0. I had bought the Z-80 card in the meantime and switched all software development to Turbo-Pascal.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> What happened to them? Microsoft poached dozens of key staff with 7 figure signing bonuses. Also, ISTR some anticompetitive thing with Windows APIs, but the poaching was decisive.
mindcrime 5y ago
The ill-conceived idea of rebranding as "Inprise"[1] certainly didn't help. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland#Inprise_Corporation_era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland#Inprise_Corporation_er...
mikeabraham 5y ago
They flew too close to the sun.
jbkiv 5y ago
For me, the only thing I truly remember about Borland is Philippe Kahn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Kahn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Kahn). Kahn is a giant: supreme intelligence, accomplished musician, worldwide competitive sailor. He is also a big and tall man. He is also the person who sent the first photo via a telephone. I first met him in 95 when I invited him to speak at a Wharton meeting. His vision of the internet blew me away. Shortly after meeting with him I quit my job to start one of the dotcom companies. Like a lot of companies ran by Founders, Borland had a face, for me it was Kahn.
- jaggs 5y ago
  As far as I can tell, Philippe Khan was the reason Borland failed.
  - jbkiv 5y ago
    I have heard a different story (but from Kahn's side): that the board did not back him up when he presented his internet strategy. He left after that, arguing that the board did not have the vision.
  - satisfice 5y ago
    Kahn was a poor visionary overall. He didn’t have a vision of the web at all. His vision— articulated to us in 93 and 94 was “client/server.” Close, but really not the same thing. He drove constant reorgs that followed the pattern of: centralize then decentralize then centralize then decentralize… He bought Ashton Tate, which was a big mistake. I don’t think Kahn was good at leading a big company, and it seemed to me and my friends there at the time that he was floundering.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      > [Philippe Khan] bought Ashton Tate, which was a big mistake. Was it really? It brought in dBase to make simple desktop (as opposed to client-server) database apps super-easy to develop in Delphi, and IIRC Interbase to make client-server DB apps easy and cheap todeploy (thanks to the license terms of the CS version) too. I always thought had they stuck to that, and not veered into .NET and that whole weird ALM software pivot, they could have done much better. I don't know how much you are at liberty to tell, but if there is anything more you can say about it: Why was the Ashton-Tate acquisition a "big mistake"?
FpUser 5y ago
I still use Delphi (it is being actively developed) for my Windows Desktop products and Lazarus (Delphi's opensource clone) for Windows / Linux desktop clients. I do not think anything comes close to the practical feature set, ease of use, power and long term stability for GUI creation. Well QT does but at what expense. Meanwhile HTML/javascript based frontends is a pitiful clusterfuck comparatively. Modern computers have more than enough power to have the HTML/javascript front end with the power of Delphi. Why oh why web tool creators have to come up with abominations like React instead. The end result is that in case of Delphi the tool works for you. In case of popular web GUI frameworks it is the other way around.
- chadcmulligan 5y ago
  I'm starting a Delphi job in the new year, engineering software, its good to see it's still around, and I'm looking forward to no more HTML :-)
- CRConrad 5y ago
  Checked out Jon Lennart Aasenden's compile-to-JavaScript Object Pascal IDE/compiler? I don't know how far he's got with it, but might be worth looking it up.
  - FpUser 5y ago
    It is not practical for me personally even if it is perfect for 2 reasons: 1) Unless it comes with completely ported VCL I do not see how it would be useful. 2) Doing it for the language's sake - I am not a language zealot and am fine to use whatever suits me better for particular situation. JS as front end for my servers works fine for me. For example even though Delphi / Lazarus is fine for developing servers I prefer doing it in C++. Backend libraries and performance are superior in my opinion.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      1) It pretty much does, AIUI. 2) "Doing it for the language's sake" -- Not necessarily the language itself, but he clarity it affords you. I could never quite get my head around the "half-typed, half-not; half-OO, half-not" nature of JavaScript; it just feels so... messy, to me. Any other language that avoids those as well as Pascal would do me equally well. (Hm, what does that leave? BASIC, C, COBOL, and FORTRAN...?) 2 B) "C++, superior backend libraries and performance" -- Maybe... but not by all that much, AIUI. Compensated for by clarity and simplicity (leading to better safety and productivity) on Pascal's side, IMO.
davidw 5y ago
Not specific to Borland, but this book makes for entertaining reading: https://www.powells.com/book/in-search-of-stupidity-over-20-years-of-high-tech-marketing-disasters-9781590597217 https://www.powells.com/book/in-search-of-stupidity-over-20-... He does get a few things wrong though, like open source. The best bits focus more on the 80ies.
dvh 5y ago
They threw amateur scene overboard and changed the price from $100 to $3000 per seat. People moved to cheaper options. When companies needed new people they couldn't find anyone with Delphi experience so they were forced to switch. Now nobody uses Delphi and it is impossible to find people who knows it.
- Tozen 5y ago
  I would say that is an oversimplification. People use Delphi, but it's not aimed at hobbyists, independent developers, or arguably even small businesses. Embarcadero (owner of Delphi) goes for the deep pockets and the enterprise. The very obvious problem with that tactic is you dry up your grassroots. Which was a problem for some years. To compensate, Embarcadero now leans on its free Community Edition of Delphi and cheap school/academic licenses, to create a developer talent pool. The other quiet thing that they do is also lean on open source Free Pascal/Lazarus to help build an Object Pascal community and more interest. For those that don't know, Delphi is a dialect of Object Pascal. Lazarus allows importing of Delphi projects, and is a pretty similar dialect, though there are differences. Another element of the game played by Embarcadero (and Borland before it), is a lot of people don't realize they have a foot in the C++ world too, with their C++ Builder and open-source Dev-C++. They have other products in which they get revenue from too or to get attention.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > Now nobody uses Delphi and it is impossible to find people who knows it. Hey, if you need somebody who knows Delphi, I do.
hi41 5y ago
I used Borland C++ in the late 90s. It had a quirky UI. I remember that many windows would just float around instead of them being docked like Visual C++. I read in a magazine (probably Byte magazine) that there were layoffs at Borland and that a famous engineer got fired and he drove to Seattle to work for Microsoft. Looking at other comments it looks like Borland fell into bad times in late 90s.
- mmphosis 5y ago
  I miss floating tool palettes.
YesThatTom2 5y ago
The answer is well-documented in Merrill R. Chapman’s book “In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters” Terrible title but great book. Basically Microsoft dominated every software category by waiting for the #1 company to make a dumb mistake. They then swooped in and won. This book is an excellent but biased history of that era.
pbreit 5y ago
Acquired by Microfocus in 2005. Apparently some of the products live on: https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/products/borland/overview https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/products/borland/overview I also wonder what Phillipe Kahn is up to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Kahn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Kahn
racl101 5y ago
Oh gawd, those CDs were everywhere when I was in uni.
AlbertCory 5y ago
This story is mid-80s, not later on. I was at Analytica, which made Reflex. It debuted in 1985 and sank, to good notices and dismal sales. Borland bought the company for less than the VCs had invested, cut the price to $99, advertised it, sold it by mail order, and made it a hit for a couple years. Several of the key execs at Analytica went to Borland and then to Microsoft; some of them are fairly famous now. I don't know anything about the limos or the lawsuits. I heard Kahn talk in early 1985, and the Analytica founders made fun of him, for selling his product through mail order when everyone knew you had to go through BusinessLand and ComputerLand.
WalterBright 5y ago
Back in the late 80's or so, Borland did a lot of direct mail advertising that would start out with "Dear Friend XXXX", where XXXX was the target's name. I was in Phillipe Kahn's office once talking with him, and noticed that tacked on the wall was one of those letters. Across it was written in heavy red ink: "Dear Phillipe, I am not your fucking friend. Got it, Phil baby?" How could you not like a man who'd stick that on his office wall?
- h2odragon 5y ago
  I sorta had the feeling he fell victim to "cult of personality" eventually. Everybody telling him he was so great he lost touch with reality. Or was he never actually connected in the first place?
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    I didn't know him well enough to know if he emanated a "Reality Distortion Field" like Jobs and Holmes did. But he was very charismatic.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  I did learn one technique from this. I finally managed to put a stop to Capitol One sending me credit card offers in the mail practically every day. I'd write over the offer letter in heavy red crayon a profanity-laced diatribe and mail it back in their business reply envelope. It took several tries, but the CO junk mail finally ceased.
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  I checked out this guy's resume and even after Borland he has sold two companies for $300M each. A fantastic engineer and entrepreneur I think.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
narag 5y ago
After Anders' departure, they created a promising project to make Delphi for Linux that was making progress. At the time Borland had sued Microsoft for some big IP feud. Then suddenly an arrangement was made. Delphi for Linux was rushed, released unfinished and flopped. Borland got $30M and access to every .NET documentation. But Delphi.NET was never very popular because it was never as good as VS.NET. .NET modules were added to Windows native Delphi and slowed down the IDE. IDE price skyrocketed, users flew and after some acquisitions dance, Delphi is owned by IDERA... not sure how it's doing now because they closed developers' forums years ago.
JJMcJ 5y ago
Borland fell for Microsoft's OS/2 fiasco, and devoted a lot of energy to porting products there, to no economic benefit. At that time I was using Borland C++ and the quality really went downhill. Errors that never should have gotten past QA. Either they weren't checking or were intentionally shipping with killer bugs. One release the license said you couldn't use it to make a long list of products that would compete against Borland, like spreadsheets or databases. They rolled back that provision a little later. Then releases every couple of months. I just gave up them, they had burned the tremendous good will originally generated by Turbo Pascal, which, it should be mentioned, was created originally by Anders Hejlsberg.
- satisfice 5y ago
  OS/2 was not a problem for Borland? Why? Because IBM paid us to do that! We didn’t lose money on that. Or not MUCH money, anyway. The license agreement thing was a failure of imagination. The project team didn’t ever think we needed to review legal language. But after that fiasco we made sure that we did. I tell that story in my classes. You are right about slipping quality. It was just an unsustainable rate of development. I was ringing alarm bells inside the team, and management was hearing them, but they said “look, either we ship or we start laying off the team.” So you are mostly right.
  - JJMcJ 5y ago
    Phillipe Kahn seemed bitter over OS/2. Perhaps using up the company's intellectual resources, when the resources could have been better used elsewhere, money from IBM or no money. But that's just a guess for why.
    - satisfice 5y ago
      I don’t know if any other part of the company worked on OS/2. But in the languages group it was one of those death march projects that helped forge the team into a better working unit. The project was bad but I missed the people I worked with when it was over. And like I said, IBM footed a lot of the bill for it. I think the secret to Borland’s fall is mostly that we had to earn our way forward, whereas Microsoft could write huge checks to itself. It’s like we were playing a video game against someone using cheats.
RickJWagner 5y ago
I remember going to trade shows (i.e. 'SDWest') back in the day when Borland was big. The thing I remember most: They had some guy (short, with very long hair) that did demos for them. Live and without a net. He was good, and a good crowd pleaser. I hope he's doing well today.
s_severus 5y ago
As a teenager in the UK I bought an issue of a PC magazine that had a cover CD (remember?) with Borland C++ Builder. That's what got me started with programming. A while later the same mag gave away a copy of Delphi. That really opened things up. I found it was more accessible and was quickly making all kinds of stupid windows forms apps and sharing them with friends. So, no insight into what went wrong but the name Borland has very positive associations for me, and it's safe to say their products played a role in the course my life took.
- HeckFeck 5y ago
  > A while later the same mag gave away a copy of Delphi. Funny you mention that, was it PC Pro? I bought the same magazine a long time ago, I remember the CD. I really wanted to make windows appear and things happen on screen. But I unfortunately couldn't figure out the programming. It only came to me much later and long after Delphi (and winforms) had fallen.
  - s_severus 5y ago
    Either PC Pro or PC Plus! Hard to remember exactly all these year later. I wrote more about how it fit into my journey as a dev in this essay: https://www.michaelbromley.co.uk/blog/confessions-of-an-intermediate-programmer/#the-fuck-generator https://www.michaelbromley.co.uk/blog/confessions-of-an-inte...
    - HeckFeck 5y ago
      Just finished giving it a read, thanks for sharing. Maybe some day I'll have done enough interesting things with programming to write a similar tale.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      PC Plus, I'd guess. They had a long-standing series of columns by Huw Collingbourne on developing with it. Another quirky memory of 1990s Brithish PC magazines: PC Shopper had a column by then-pharmacist-turned-computer-guy, now not wholly-unknown SF author Charlie Stross.
macrowhat 5y ago
They underestimated Richard Stallman
satisfice 5y ago
I was in the Borland Languages division as a test manager and staff metrics engineer until I was recruited away at the start of 1995. At that time we were beginning to struggle to compete with Microsoft. We had been winning for a long time because we were close-knit and highly motivated. We were scrappy competitors. The first real blow is that we moved into a new office complex that literally forced the team to sit separately instead on close to each other. That was a big hit on morale and productivity. Then Microsoft seemed to get its shit together and spend a lot of money on R&D. A lot more than they could have been getting in as revenue. Just after I left this forced Borland into an unsustainable cadence of delivery. Soon afterward Microsoft just started wildly hiring our best people. The thing is, for the period I worked at Borland, I instigated or participated in many of the innovations in process and testing that even today are coming as a surprise to people I teach… We had a fantastic team! Jothy Rosenberg, for instance, whom you can find on LinkedIn as founder of his Nth successful company, was my counterpart in development. He’s probably the most gifted technical leader I have encountered in my whole career.
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  I checked out Jothy Rosenberg. Deeply moved by his perseverance, will power and technical sophistication. Wish I knew him in person.
stonecharioteer 5y ago
On that note what happened to BloodShed DevC++?
- fmxexpress 5y ago
  Embarcadero sponsored its upgrade to support Windows 10/8/7. https://github.com/Embarcadero/Dev-Cpp https://github.com/Embarcadero/Dev-Cpp
lucas_membrane 5y ago
Borland spent quite a tidy sum buying dBase (Ashton-Tate IIRC), something like half a billion $, back when that was money. This put them under quite a bit of pressure. Another thing happened around that time, as the memory size and speed and number of desktop computers multiplied. Software broke out of the 640 kb limit, so feature sets went bonkers. This made it extremely challenging to deliver products with a very low price and very low support cost, two pillars of Borland's success. C++ came along, to develop which MS could afford a 9-figure price. All of this put a lot of pressure on Borland and everyone else. Total profits for the software industry were lower than total profits for Microsoft. Borland and many others could not find a way and ran to the exits.
ddgflorida 5y ago
Turbo Pascal was a beautiful piece of software in the 80s.

pjc50 5y ago
Everyone seemingly unaware that this still exists and you can still do it in Hejlsberg's C#? Drag and drop WPF components and program in code-behind? With themes and responsive design? (Big asterisk: mostly Windows-only and has recently lost product direction coherency)
- cosmodisk 5y ago
  Windows forms are great, whilst WPF is a bit odd,to say the least.. Here's an example: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/get-started/csharp/tutorial-wpf?view=vs-2022 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/get-started/cs...
  - the_only_law 5y ago
    I would almost like WOF is component styling wasn’t one of the most miserable clusterfucks of XML boilerplate I’ve used.
- mbreese 5y ago
  My biggest problem with the drag and drop builders was how it played with version control. The last I used was nearly 20 years ago - Windows Visual Studio C++ with MFC. Even if the builder produced C++ code, it was hard to know exactly where and how the changes were made. CVS (and maybe svn?) didn’t exactly like tracking those changes. Is that any better now?
  - fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
    One thing I really liked about Delphi was its strict separation between generated and manually-written code. Delphi had a dedicated text file format that represented the form built in the GUI builder. So, VC would just pick up changes in the form file and save them like anything else.
- ohgodplsno 5y ago
  WinForms still exists and is fine for the odd quick utility. Doing WPF without ever having to drop in the XAML is... unlikely to say the least. You're going to end up in there are one point, because styles are fucking you over or for some other reason (databinding? lol). But yes, C# is still keeping the drag & drop alive. So are plenty of tools (Lazarus, hell even Android Studio has a drag & drop designer).
- nostrademons 5y ago
  Also Android Studio, XCode, all the React builder websites, etc. Basically every GUI platform + IDE has some form of a drag & drop interface builder. The problem is that outside of the iOS ecosystem, there are too many subtle differences in behavior to really trust the results. And because a lot of software gets worldwide distribution these days, it's economically worth it to squeeze that last bit of performance & user friendliness out of the framework. So most professional programmers learn how to do things programmatically and only use the interface builder if they're doing a quick internal tool.
- fmxexpress 5y ago
  Delphi still exists and you can still do it in Delphi. Responsive. Cross-platform on Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and Linux. Single codebase single UI.
  - zeroc8 5y ago
    Can you point to any Delphi app on the android playstore that doesn't look and feel like shit? Or a Linux app? I used to be a Delphi fan, but the results I've come across are not exactly convincing. Compare this to Flutter, which looks and feels gorgeous, at least on Android.
dmitriid 5y ago
> UIs that need to adapt to changing screen sizes, different needs, theming, and many more. People keep saying that as if that is this new thing that wasn't ever heard of before the web or smartphones. Open any desktop app and resize it. Boom, you've got "changing screen sizes". And yeah, "needs are different, and we need theming is this new thing that never existed before the iPhone ".
- nawgz 5y ago
  I think forced aspect ratio was very common in the era of these oldschool UI toolkits. Additionally, handling multiple classes of pixel density and input (touch vs mouse) was unheard of.
Pxtl 5y ago
Making resolution-agnostic applications in C# Winforms wasn't hard, it was a simple flag to tell the OS how to scale the GUI. And if you used the native widgets and set tab-indexes you'd be all set for changing sizes, blind users, OS re-theming, etc. A good UI framework should handle that stuff internally... even a bad one should do that (bad, like how winforms set the wrong default font). Imho, the real reason we don't see stuff like this for the Web is that the web isn't designed for modularity. CSS, Javascript, and HTML IDs are all global. Programming 101 lesson 1 is "don't use globals" and the Web is the perfect object-lesson in why not.
- rhengles 5y ago
  CSS - Yes. JS - Not since 2015, I'll admit that is somewhat recent. HTML IDs - IDs are only good if they're unique. Since HTML had no notion of scope, they became global. Shadow DOM is the web platform answer for modularization, however any JS framework will allow you to slice your CSS and HTML in components.
- nawgz 5y ago
  > if you used the native widgets and set tab-indexes you'd be all set for changing sizes, blind users, OS re-theming, etc > Imho, the real reason we don't see stuff like this for the Web Where are you looking on the web? tab-indexes and extending native web components gives you responsiveness and accessibility. The browsers provide theming capabilities for light and dark mode, and OS level color preferences (I use "red" for selected on Mac) easily show themselves on CSS `outline` etc > Globals No one uses globals on the web. This isn't 2000, or even 2013.

nawgz 5y ago

> Fast forward to today and we are in this clusterfuck, where everyone keeps reinventing the wheel and complexities just keep growing Yes, it is quite funny to see how no toolkit exists to simply produce Web UIs in a meaningful way. However, the complexity has grown largely from externalities that didn't exist during the time of effortless interface builders, which is screen sizes and aspect ratios and pixel densities of all sorts. To handle this, you need to have some lower level primitives, and of course any time you have to go to a lower level you surface more complexity. Final point - as a person who develops web UIs professionally for 7 years now, I think that the "reinventing the wheel" has been actually quite beneficial to tame this complexity. Previously, untyped JS had to be bent into surfacing type-style error messages, and good luck with boundary crossing data. Now, TypeScript lets you describe every key in your application and have incredible confidence that a fully-typed piece of UI or logic (which of course must avoid `any`) will deliver exactly what you intended. GraphQL & codegen has given us the ability to type our boundary crossing data straight from our DB or resolvers without any runtime reflection. Runtime reflection tools like io-ts also bridge that gap admirably to program defensively in the situations it's needed. It's obviously been accompanied by a lot of churn, but with strictly typed component libraries, a bit of reusable layout logic, and Hasura, I can make sexy fully-themable UIs strictly typed all the way to and from the data source without significant effort. The complexity in my new paradigm is entirely in application-level tricks like UIs visually informing users of all the async actions, animations / transitions, avoiding dynamic content causing bad layout blips, and ensuring user input is never lost. I think this kind of thing wouldn't have been easy in any oldschool toolkit because it inherently requires some wiring that isn't easy to surface

beamatronic 5y ago

But in today's reality, there is a lot of Javascript that is getting "downloaded and installed" into your browser's cache. It's all being managed for you and it mostly works.

nawgz 5y ago
Please, you must not be pedantic in this way, it's clear that I mean there's no install wizard and OS-native interactions the user must go thru, they just provide a string URL and immediately begin application-style interactions after a brief load
- beamatronic 5y ago
  Compare and contrast today's Javascript-in-browser dependent applications versus a pure server-side-rendering model. With the latter, there is truly no software downloaded, only static assets such as images.
- DarylZero 5y ago
  It's not really pedantic. Since any application (not just a browser) could provide the same download-interpreted-code-then-run-it functionality. It's probably not this particular feature of the web browser matters but the fact that web browsers come preinstalled with new computers.
  - nawgz 5y ago
    > It's not really pedantic I mean, if not pedantic, then perhaps grinding an axe - he said 'there is a lot of Javascript that is getting "downloaded and installed"' as if that has anything to do with the user experience I was referring to > any application (not just a browser) could provide the same download-interpreted-code-then-run-it functionality I have never heard of such a platform besides the web. That is why the web became the dominant platform. I do not know what theoretical could've would've should've has to do with the reality of technological evolution > It's probably not this particular feature of the web browser ... yes, it's not the ease of use that makes users like web, it's that computers in 2021 come with browsers installed that makes users prefer web over bloated desktop applications without good accessibility anyways! I have no clue what your comment is meaning to get at.
    - DarylZero 5y ago
      >I have never heard of such a platform besides the web. Steam comes to mind. > ... yes, it's not the ease of use that makes users like web, it's that computers in 2021 come with browsers installed that makes users prefer web over bloated desktop applications Wasn't comparing to "desktop applications." I was saying that the reason that the download-code-then-run-it functionality was shoved into the browser rather than coming in some other form, was that the browsers were already on all the desktops.

grundoon 5y ago

The story I heard (I worked at Borland briefly in 1999): Microsoft would send a limo to the Borland HQ to pick up engineers for interviews on their lunch breaks. Borland sued, Microsoft settled for many millions, but basically instead of buying their rival outright (for assimilation into the Borg, lol), they just bought the talent. Last I knew Borland had changed names at least twice (Inprise, Embarcadero) and still existed, in some remnant form.

subroutine 5y ago
What was the basis of the lawsuit?
- eatonphil 5y ago
  > Saying that he "just wants Microsoft to leave us alone," Borland International (BORL) CEO Delbert Yocam today filed a lawsuit against Microsoft (MSFT), claiming that the software giant is hiring away Borland's key employees to put it out of business. https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/borland-sues-microsoft-over-brain-drain/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/borland-sues...
- Jabbles 5y ago
  "In the past 30 months, Microsoft has hired at least 34 of Borland's top software architects, engineers, and marketing managers", according to a complaint prepared by Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. These actions have been undertaken “for wrongful purposes: to acquire Borland confidential information and to inhibit Borland's competitive position,” the filing states. Borland's lawsuit seeks unspecified financial damages and an immediate end to Microsoft's unfair practice of targeting Borland employees in order to hamper the company's ability to compete. The suit claims that Microsoft's activities are illegal under California Business & Professions Code Section 17200. https://www.eetimes.com/borland-sues-microsoft-for-unfair-competition/ https://www.eetimes.com/borland-sues-microsoft-for-unfair-co...
romeros 5y ago
Ruthless. Just pure evil to target one specific company like that!
- WJW 5y ago
  Why do you think they only targeted Borland like that?
  - wombatmobile 5y ago
    Because the objective of Microsoft's recruitment was not just to acquire talent, it was to diminish their leading competitor.
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    MS was trying to pivot away from their 90s platforms, and Borland was a potential destination for customers jumping ship from stuff like VB. It was a different time. Even dinosaurs like IBM were still competitive in some verticals.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    In a nutshell: Because Borland, more than anyone else, had hugely superior development tools (compilers and IDEs) for Windows.
- Ansil849 5y ago
  You're acting like the employees were forced into the limos at gunpoint. People have free volition. Offering someone a better opportunity is not remotely 'evil'.
  - Lammy 5y ago
    "What's wrong with this country? Can't a man walk down the street without being offered a job‽" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDbvVFffWV4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDbvVFffWV4
    - tinalumfoil 5y ago
      In this case it's more like, "can't a CEO walk down the street knowing his employees are safely shielded from better work opportunities"
jamespo 5y ago
Amusingly Steve Ballmer got the hump when MS engineers started leaving for Google
- nostrademons 5y ago
  As did Google when Google engineers started leaving for Facebook, and FB when their engineers started leaving for Uber/Lyft/AirBnB/Stripe/Coinbase/etc, and so on. It's pretty much a revolving door now, where many engineers have worked at all these companies and sometimes even come back to their home base. CA's prohibition against non-competes and the DoJ's lawsuit against anti-poaching agreements is basically what makes Silicon Valley work.
  - llampx 5y ago
    Not that the giants haven't tried to be a cartel when it comes to labor. Including Jobs at Apple.
  - jamespo 5y ago
    Oh that definitely happened, but we don't have quotes from Google like this: Prior to joining Google, I set up a meeting on or about November 11, 2004 with Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer to discuss my planned departure….At some point in the conversation Mr. Ballmer said: “Just tell me it’s not Google.” I told him it was Google. At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office. Mr. Ballmer then said: “F---ing Eric Schmidt is a f---ing p--sy. I’m going to f---ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to f---ing kill Google.”
Kye 5y ago
I remember I started getting a bunch of emails from an "Embarcadero." I didn't remember subscribing, and the unsubscribe didn't work, so I just wrote a filter to skip the inbox and send them all to spam. I must have subscribed to something from Borland at some point.
Tozen 5y ago
Borland sold their software division to Embarcadero, which appears to have been a big payday for top execs as they jumped out. However, Embarcadero did do a decent job of keeping the ship afloat and running things, though Delphi got very expensive. Idera then bought Embarcadero, but appears to allow it to have a high level of autonomy.
- eitland 5y ago
  Another maybe interesting detail: At some point there was an attempted pivot as well or maybe it was just what Embarcadero always had focused on. I wasn't yet working in software then I think but there was an interview or paid article or something I think were someone told that the future of software laid not in languages and IDEs but in Software Lifecycle Management. In a way they were right: Today all major languages have free and open source implementations and Atlassian and a few others seems to have found larger or smaller sweet spots in what I think is Software Lifecycle Management or something. That said what could Borland do at that point? It probably felt worse for them to bet the farm but in my opinion it absolutely isn't the most bone headed moveI have seen. That said: The ads not so long after for "Delphi con" or something similar with large "No toothbrush required", that didn't exactly seem smart to me. I think by then everyone who used their products were grown up serious business programmers.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    > At some point there was an attempted pivot as well or maybe it was just what Embarcadero always had focused on. [...] that the future of software laid not in languages and IDEs but in Software Lifecycle Management. That was after they'd changed their name from Borland to Inprise, before they sold out to Embarcadero. I think that, in contrast to this, Embarcadero still bought them mainly for the IDEs.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      > I think that, in contrast to this, Embarcadero still bought them mainly for the IDEs. Indeed, seems it was the dev tools division Emba bought. Maybe the ALM div is still around. Hm, have I actually heard somewhere they even switched the name or that back from Inprise to Borland, or am I imagining it? Naah, can't be -- 't'would be both too pathetic and too absurd.
MichaelMoser123 5y ago
Interesting, do they make a similar effort to hire IntelliJ staff? I mean they could offer a much higher sallary than what they would get in Russia. Or is it all due to having the top guy, who is in the know on who-is-who?

ryaniscool 5y ago

No. One man's departure did not bring down Borland. Years after this guy left JBuilder was a great product that made them tons of money in the early 2000s. Java's popularity explosion (think J2EE) came years after the J++ debacle and JBuilder cashed in. They disappeared because they weren't able to compete with the commoditization of Java IDE's (Eclipse) and Microsoft's integrated sales channel on Windows (Visual Studio). These two things killed their two biggest products.

StevePerkins 5y ago
They weren't able to compete with those things in the early-2000's, yet JetBrains was founded in 2000 and has had nothing but growth and success ever since. The quality of leadership at Borland fell off, and the organization lost its vision and ability to execute. Simple as that.
- mthoms 5y ago
  I suspect JetBrains location in Eastern Europe helped a great deal talent-wise.
  - stickfigure 5y ago
    Maybe, but I really doubt it. "Our developers are cheaper" is rarely a winning strategy. JetBrains did - and still does - execute well. They expanded their IDE to many languages and caught the Ruby, Node, and Typescript waves. Borland did JBuilder, yes, but it wasn't category-winning. Maybe Delphi could have dominated with more investment and more imagination, but it seems to have risen and fallen with Win32.
    - zeroc8 5y ago
      Their pricing strategy always sucked. I mean, 4000 Bucks for a Java IDE? Jetbrains on the other hand did the right thing from the beginning by asking money but keeping the price realistic.
  - dilyevsky 5y ago
    If I recall Borland had very strong team in Saint Petersburg that moved entirely to JB
randcraw 5y ago
Borland staff also disappeared because M$ made them offers that they couldn't refuse. Departing engineers were offered megabucks salaries which lasted only a year or two, but were enough to decimate the ranks of Borland's talent and wipe out the company's skillbase. Of course, Borland wasn't the only competitor to receive this kind of attention from M$. In the 1999 federal prosecution of M$ for antitrust, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson found that 'Microsoft used its "market power" to unlawfully "maintain its monopoly in the operating system market," violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. Microsoft, the Appeals Court found, unfairly used its monopoly power to strongarm computer manufacturers, Internet access providers, Internet content providers, independent software vendors, and companies like AOL, Apple, Intel, and Sun Microsystems.' https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/07/09/the-microsoft-verdict https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/07/09/the-microsoft-...
CRConrad 5y ago
> They disappeared because they weren't able to compete with the commoditization of Java IDE's (Eclipse) and Microsoft's integrated sales channel on Windows (Visual Studio). That, plus their weird and (IMO obviously even at the time) misguided pivot to emphasise SLM systems over dev tools. Well, it may be the same thing: seems likely this pivot was what led to them not being able to keep up with Microsoft on dev tools.

ccleve 5y ago

Exactly this. Pascal was a great language, and I wonder how much we've lost by having it go by the wayside. It was strongly-typed, easy to read, cross-platform, produced native executables, and was lightning fast to compile and execute. I say "was" a great language because it isn't widely used today. I miss it.

qalmakka 5y ago
Also it had sane strings. Strings with sizes, withouth the whole null-terminated madness of C which still haunts us nowadays.
- jstimpfle 5y ago
  "Sane" strings that may waste 4 bytes of length field for unnecessary count, or may have a 1 or 2 bytes length field that proves to be insufficient. Or "sane" strings that alloc and dealloc and refcount like mad, bringing the application to a stall. "Sane" strings that discourage the developer from just coming up with a simple memory management scheme that fits the situation at hand. "Sane" strings that lead to incredible bloat and incompatibility, because there is no one true "sane" string type, so every module that doesn't know better forces their own way onto the user.
  - nwiswell 5y ago
    Obviously C-style strings can still remain an option where they are needed, but in most cases using the 4 bytes for a length field is a sane default. How many buffer overflow attacks have been enabled by that four byte savings over the years? > "Sane" strings that discourage the developer from just coming up with a simple memory management scheme that fits the situation at hand. "Sane" compilers that discourage the developer from considering the machine level instructions. It's turtles all the way down. There's a reason that Python is so popular and it's not performance
    - jstimpfle 5y ago
      This is not Python so that's a strawman.
      - nwiswell 5y ago
        By that I meant that there is obviously value in abstracting away tasks and details that the programmer would otherwise need to manage. That is why compilers exist. The value-add for abstracting a string is certainly more than the cost of 4 bytes of memory in the typical case. Put another way: optimizing the management of strings in memory is almost never the best use of time to make progress toward an organization's objectives, and doubly so when that kind of micro-tuning can actually introduce security risks
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    I hardly consider four bytes to track the length of a string "waste". I also don't really know why you assume that "sane" means "doesn't let you manage memory effectively". That said, how many applications really are bottlenecked by string processing in the first place? I don't care if processing Unicode graphemes is slow, as long as it's correct and doesn't mangle users' names.
    - novok 5y ago
      He is probably thinking about the context of the 1980s, when a large amount of 3 byte waste (the 1 byte null char is a form of 'waste' itself) might have been a problem back then.
      - jstimpfle 5y ago
        Packed structs with char fields of 8 bytes or so are still common.
    - jstimpfle 5y ago
      Well I for one optimized an authorization module of an enterprise application written in Delphi by getting rid of standard library strings. Speedups where 100x-1000x, accelerating application startup time from minutes to maybe 3 seconds.
  - johnfn 5y ago
    The thing is, not every developer wants to care about memory management. A lot of us just want to solve user problems, and we don’t mind too much if we spend a couple of extra bytes to do so.
    - jstimpfle 5y ago
      It's not primarily about the bytes. Heap allocating RAII style strings can absolutely kill performance. And they are baaaad for modularity. It's all in my OP, why do I even repeat?
  - Jtsummers 5y ago
    If the length field is 4 bytes then only 3 bytes are "wasted" compared to C with its null-terminated strings and 1-byte chars. The difference drops if you have wider character types. Not to mention the time saved not having to scan every string to determine its length. I always find it weird when people fret about bytes but not cycles, especially cycles that have to be spent waiting for memory reads.
    - yongjik 5y ago
      You are thinking as a developer in 2020s, not one in 1990s (or earlier). Memory was incredibly precious: 16-bit x86 had 64KB segments, so if your data didn't fit in, it would be a lot slower. People used nibbles (4 bits) because the extra instructions dealing with bit twiddling was worth the cost. Basically, no sane programmer in the 90s would be happy with a string type that wasted three bytes per object.
      - Jtsummers 5y ago
        CPU cycles were also incredibly precious. It's a tradeoff. In the 80s and 90s you also had smaller caches so iterating over a string to determine its length was more expensive (more likely to hit RAM) than "just" reading its length parameter and carrying on with your life.
        yongjik 5y ago
        Sure everything was more expensive, but not by the same factor. Main memory was smaller but also relatively faster compared to CPU. Search for "386 simm memory" and you'll see 60ns modules. Considering that 386 debuted with 12MHz clock, 60 ns is faster than one CPU clock cycle! In other words, "reading the whole string from memory" could be a performance problem, but a less serious problem for machines of those days, compared to using a few more bytes to store the length.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Yet JOVIAL, NEWP, PL/I, PL/S, PL.8 among other Algol dialects managed it.
  - mdip 5y ago
    This never, ever bit me in the Pascal days. I suspect this was primarily because the stack I was using was either "provided by the Borland Pascal standard library" pieces, or it was my own Pascal or assembler code. I had a limited number of calls into a library and a need to do a few things that escape me with regard to interacting with -- I think -- an 16550 UART[0] and its driver, but I don't recall them being particularly nasty to deal with. I mean, all things relative -- I was expecting these to be nasty to deal with because they often involved inline assembler, so the problem of "making it behave with the string" wasn't quite as pressing as "what the hell am I actually doing here?" :) [0] My huge project was a bulletin board system in the 90s.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    How is iterating over the string each time you want to do anything meaningful better? Also, there is a short string optimization, where you can store the string inside the pointer , eg. c++ does just that.
    - jstimpfle 5y ago
      You didn't read my comment right. My statement is there isn't one true string type. I didn't say you shouldn't use a length field. Zero terminated strings still make some sense of course - ease of reading when looking at byte level representation, and moderate cost savings in packed structs (4, 8, or 16 byte strings). The former is why I zero terminate by default where possible, even when using a separate length field stored somewhere else (almost always).
  - adrianmsmith 5y ago
    I don't know the details but I doubt that 4 bytes would be used for a length of a string in the 90s. 2 bytes would lead to 64k characters which is surely more than you'd need for the average string. And surely if you malloc(..) a block of memory in C and store a string in it, the memory allocation system is going to store how large a block that is anyway (even if it isn't visible to either C or Pascal probably.) I know not all strings will be malloc'd but a lot will be. And we seemed to deal with this overhead fine in the 90s?
    - jstimpfle 5y ago
      That you have to weigh 2 vs. 4 byte lengths is exactly making my point. There is also a case for 1 byte lengths, and for string implementations other than length + pointer, like for example rope datastructure implementations. My point is that there is not one sensible string implementation, and acting like there was is in many situations trading short term convenience for long term pains in larger projects. > I know not all strings will be malloc'd but a lot will be. And we seemed to deal with this overhead fine in the 90s? It's a common but deeply flawed assumption that allocations and lifetimes are so random that every little object should be individually allocated and later deallocated with malloc()/free() or with another generic allocator. I don't use malloc() to allocate string buffers - except in rare situtations of laziness, knowing it will come back to bite me later. Not only performance concerns but also the practical impossibility of matching each malloc() with a free() forbids that. Systems like RAII come to help to solve the latter issue, but I prefer to take the difficulty of matching everything up as an indication that the general approach is too complicated. Instead I recommend to allocate strings using a fixed field (eg. char buf[16]) on a stack frame, or using a member in a struct, in order not to add any management overhead. Alternatively, for unbounded and dynamically sized strings, it's often a good idea to allocate them using linear allocators. For example, in a GUI renderer, it's a good idea to have a per-frame allocator that collects all allocations in a list of larger chunks, to minimize the allocation overhead to a few chunks (KBs to MBs) that were individually allocated from the system. With this, everything is freed using a single central function call after the frame was renderered and the data is now not needed any longer.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Languages 10 years older than C have proper strings, in a certain sense there are some design decisions common to Go and C, regarding adoption of common features.
- masklinn 5y ago
  > Also it had sane strings. Strings with sizes Except they were prefixes on the buffer which was bad and not sane, and greatly limited the size of the original pascal strings. And technically they were UCSD strings, not standard pascal, and other implementations used e.g. padded strings.
teeray 5y ago
> strongly-typed, easy to read, cross-platform, produced native executables, and was lightning fast to compile and execute. Sounds like Go
- doodpants 5y ago
  Except that Go is for command line programs and backend code; its standard library doesn't include a cross-platform GUI API for desktop applications.
  - zamadatix 5y ago
    What was the stdlib's cross platform GUI like in Pascal?
    - codr7 5y ago
      Probably could have been awesome, the Windows flavor certainly was; but they dropped Kylix before it got a chance to go anywhere.
      - Tozen 5y ago
        You might want to look at Delphi's VLC and FireMonkey. With Free Pascal/Lazarus, they have the LCL (open source equivalent to VLC). Free Pascal/Lazarus has no problem with Linux or macOS. It was Delphi that stumbled around for some years about this, but presently can also be installed now on both. Of course, Delphi cost the big bucks.
        CRConrad 5y ago
        VCL, not VLC. Visual Component Library.
        Tozen 5y ago
        LOL, you are right, such a silly typo. I was actually playing around with VLC player at that time, so must have got "crossed wires".
thriftwy 5y ago
On the other hand, it was verbose, and most of original Pascal ideas were unsound and replaced in Object Pascal with ones coming from C. "Break loop" being a function rather than keyword is serious PHP land. It had better OO than C++, though. I admit it, they managed to have a sane and compact statically checked compilable OO.
- Tozen 5y ago
  Seems like you are a bit mistaken, as Object Pascal borrowed very little from C, nor did it need to. Object Pascal is just an extension of Pascal. Objects and Classes are just another type, just like Records. The relationship between Pascal and Object Pascal is extremely close, far more than say between C and C++. Which is why many get confused, thinking there is such a similar gap. OO in Object Pascal is a lot more sane than in C++, because the concept of an Object was more aligned to the existing Record type. It would be something like taking C and empowering its structs with methods. There wasn't an attempt to make radical changes, but simply extend the language with OO. Where with C++, in comparison to C, much more fundamental changes were made that created more conflicts in how the languages are used.
pjmlp 5y ago
At least in Germany it is still used enough to have a presence on some magazines, and there is an yearly conference.
visarga 5y ago
I used Pascal between 1992 and 2000, one thing I missed a lot was dynamic lists and dictionaries. It was so hard to develop everything with pointers and allocations, so fragile.

gavinray 5y ago

It's not ruthless -- it's business. If the fault lies on anyone, it's the employees who accepted the offers. If they really thought it was "evil", they would have denied the offer on moral grounds or in loyalty to their employer. Do you not frequently get offers for more money than you are currently making at your employer? I would be a massive asshole if I accepted and left a job every time I got one of those -- especially in this market! Since they succeeded in hiring so much of their company away, it seems none of them felt particularly attached to Borland or their work there, compared to a salary. The only "evil" in the situation is how easily some (most?) people will abandon you the moment they get a better opportunity. I suppose Borland could have matched salaries or tried to keep their employees in whatever way (maybe they did, who knows?) but at the end of the day either they didn't, or it wasn't enough for those engineers.

thesuitonym 5y ago
>The only "evil" in the situation is how easily some (most?) people will abandon you the moment they get a better opportunity. As if your company wouldn't fire you the moment it was more lucrative to do so.
fknorangesite 5y ago
> It's not ruthless -- it's business. It's not like these things are mutually exclusive.
- gavinray 5y ago
  It's a dick move, and I wouldn't do it, but I am also not beholden to a board of investors/shareholders that expect to see positive ROE at the end of the day.
  - anonymousiam 5y ago
    This is part of Microsoft's core culture. Bill Gates championed the philosophy of doing anything it takes to get ahead, as long as there's some argument that it might be legal.
    - gavinray 5y ago
      And to their credit they've been fantastically successful. I enjoy many things in my day-to-day life by Microsoft provided "free" of charge. Take that for what you will.
      - anonymousiam 5y ago
        So what I left out of my comment are the ethical implications of doing whatever you want, as long as there's no law against it. Many behaviors are unethical, while still (for the time being) legal.
      - quickthrower2 5y ago
        Thank Linus and RMS not Microsoft. They were forced to play catchup with the free/open source movement.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Wait till you hear how they compete for suppliers, customers, and regulatory changes. Business is about gaining an advantage over a rival. Scoping up rival employees is a 2x activity, you get talent and a competitor has less.
romeros 5y ago
You can take a job and leave if they pay you more. That is fine. Microsoft isn't really only trying to gain talent. They want to drain the life blood out of their competition so they can get ahead. That intention is evil
- can16358p 5y ago
  It's a tactic. A dark one for sure. But corporations aren't known for being philanthropist anyway even if they spend millions on PR to mask that image. As long as there's no enforcement (and in a free capitalist economy it's hard to enforce this, and I personally think it shouldn't be enforced too) these will happen. The best thing that smaller companies can do is to adapt and play by the rules if they can't change them. Not saying it's good or bad. It is just it is.
Rexxar 5y ago
> It's not ruthless -- it's business. Targeting all employees of a smaller company to destroy them is considered unfair business practice in some countries (legitimately IMHO). It's similar than selling at loss until your smaller competitor is out of business.
- gavinray 5y ago
  > It's similar than selling at loss until your smaller competitor is out of business. Why is this considered illegal or unethical? This seems like a fairly legitimate tactical move to me. It's like a war of attrition -- you allow yourself to suffer losses for the sake of ultimately winning. At least in this scenario, the main player is also slightly fucking themselves over, instead of just you.
  - tomnipotent 5y ago
    > Why is this considered illegal or unethical? After competitors are knocked out of the market, the survivor can raise prices to above-market levels. https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/single-firm-conduct/predatory-or-below-cost https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
    - gavinray 5y ago
      Ah this is true, hadn't considered this. It seems like there's a lot of this all the time though? Everywhere I've lived, my only choice of ISP was Comcast. Whatever Comcast told me I needed to pay for internet, that's what I was going to pay lol. For mobile phone providers, in the US your options are generally AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, which I'm sure collude on prices and fix them. Same with Cloud services providers, etc
FpUser 5y ago
>"The only "evil" in the situation is how easily some (most?) people will abandon you the moment they get a better opportunity." To keep feeding bosses while loosing potential raise? Thanks but no thanks

zepto 5y ago

Not really. Borland could have issued attractive stock based retention packages to the employees they wanted to keep, and forced Microsoft to acquire the company or go away. This was on Borland for not adequately valuing their staff.

duped 5y ago
Borland was losing over a hundred million in revenue while Microsoft was offering seven figure signing bonuses. There's no way they could have paid more than what MS was, since MS was using their war chest to kill the company.
- xchaotic 5y ago
  as the op says - they could have issued stock instead of real money
  - duped 5y ago
    Equity schmequity, and we don't know what Borland did or didn't offer to keep people around. We just know MS offered more.
    - zepto 5y ago
      We know for sure that Borland didn’t offer enough. And we can reasonable speculate that they didn’t offer a significant ownership stake.
  - speedgeek 5y ago
    "Stock Instead of Real Money" is my new band name. So much meaning in just five words :)
  - bitwize 5y ago
    I call equity "Bison dollars": https://youtu.be/Shxiy7l5b_4 https://youtu.be/Shxiy7l5b_4 It's only worth anything if the world-domination plans go off without a hitch.
  - FpUser 5y ago
    Anders got 3mil signing bonus. Hard to counter that.
    - zepto 5y ago
      Easy - give him 4 mil in equity. On the other hand if the company doesn’t have good prospects, then indeed there is nothing you can do.
      - FpUser 5y ago
        Personally I would rather take cash.
        zepto 5y ago
        You would likely think differently if you cared about the product and had invested time in developing it. Having said that, there is no evidence their developers felt differently to you.
        FpUser 5y ago
        I do almost nothing but develop products. However as product becomes mature I start looking for new things to do. Also maintenance of mature product requires different type of people, not inventors.
        zepto 5y ago
        Obviously this isn’t how Anders Hejlsberg, who invented and then ‘maintained’ C# for a decade thinks about things.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  a million dollar signing bonus? Is there documentation of this?
- zepto 5y ago
  If they were losing a hundred million in revenue before their best employees were poached then we should thank Microsoft for saving these people‘s careers.
ConcernedCoder 5y ago
how do I upvote a comment more than once?
guessbest 5y ago
I remember hearing rumors that microsoft would pay some developers $1 million a year and tell them to just take a vacation instead of work at borland.
- rootsudo 5y ago
  Man, 1999 sounds wild.
llampx 5y ago
Long term this kind of practice is bad for engineers the same way Wal-Mart driving other retailers out of town with low prices due to their size was bad for small businesses and small towns in the 90s and 00s.