I have recently joined a small successful ISV selling and developing a couple of Delphi apps in an industry vertical in which I have significant experience; my

I have recently joined a small successful ISV selling and developing a couple of Delphi apps in an industry vertical in which I have significant experience; my prior experience has been C#/.Net for quite a while, and before that Java. I recall buying the Delphi IDE way back in the day; possibly when I was still at university, definitely when Borland was still around! So some informed observations: 1. The quality of the IDE is incredibly dire compared to Visual Studio+Resharper or Jetbrains IntelliJ. Perhaps it will be improved if a buy a license for Castalia. That said, I've been using XE3, maybe the more recent versions are better but it seems that Embarcadero have been focusing on getting into the cross-platform mobile game (one which I think Xamarin/Phonegap/Titanium, etc are playing better) rather than increasing the quality of the tools or enhancing the language. XE6 may have some improvements under Embarcadero's "QPS" (Quality/Performance/Stability) project. We haven't upgraded our licenses since the versions since XE3 didn't bring anything for us, but if we want to see Delphi survive then perhaps we should be chucking some money Embarcadero's way! 2. The language is quite verbose, and I find the need to declare the 'interface' for a class separate to the implementation of the methods quite cute. There's so much ceremony around anonymous methods that it hardly seems worth it some times. Lack of built-in multicast delegates for event handlers. 3. I recently attended a local symposium put on by the user group. There didn't appear to be much diversity amongst the attendees. I would charge that lack of diversity is not a sign of a healthy software development community. Speaking with one of the organiser's, they mentioned that Embarcadero doesn't introduce new Delphi customers to the user group any more since it is just "grumpy old men". 4. At this symposium one of the talks was on dependency injection. I was bemused that this was a new idea to the Delphi world. One of the advertisers in the symposium papers was a consultancy whose pitch basically was "so you've been making money from selling a product, but you're getting old and want to retire. Pass the source code and rights over to use and we'll work out an arrangement to continue development whilst maintaining a royalty stream for you". 5. Packaging of open-source for easy reuse is challenging in Delphi. Unlike managed environments such as .Net or Java, reusing well-known open source components is as simple as adding an assembly or a JAR to your project (yes, I acknowledge that in the past this has had its own challenges, but I think in the .Net world at least Nuget has largely conquered this). The native binaries nature of Delphi has meant there is no such equivalent (that I'm aware of), although I'm considering leveraging Nuget's packaging format and tools for BPLs.