
22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks - vs2
http://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/2017-january-22years-delphi.html
======
alex_duf
I remember using Delphi 2 when I was younger, that's how I learned
programming. If you don't mind hearing my personal story, keep reading,
otherwise move on to another comment.

By an interesting coincidence I was given a CD with tons of software on it,
including Delphi 2. I started playing with it and quickly realised I could
create my own programs using that tool.

Later I went to the book store and found a book about it that I couldn't
afford. So I came back every week to read as much as I could, then heading
back home to try it on my illegal copy of Delphi. (I was 11)

Then I realised there was a help manual embedded in the distribution, so I
learned as much English as I could so I could understand that manual.

Little by little I learned about conditions, loops, object programming and
made a bunch of terribly crappy yet working games.

No amount of studies could have taught me as much as I learned through using
that software. No manual work could have given me the fun I had when
programming my very own games. Reading "Delphi" as a headline on hacker news
made me feel nostalgic and I figured I'd share my story here.

So thanks Borland, the 11 year old me may not have paid to use that software,
but it was enough of a revelation to make me the programmer I am today.

~~~
marcosdumay
> so I learned as much English as I could so I could understand that manual.

:)

I started learning English as a kid to understand what was happening on the MS
BASIC programs I could get on my computer by the time.

~~~
mseebach
I remember the penny dropping when I learned what "if" meant in English (I
already knew what it did in BASIC).

~~~
wirrbel
Same here

------
yoodenvranx
Delphi is still unrivaled when it comes to rapid GUI prototyping in
combination with easy deployment. It's much easier than QT/GTK and you usually
get a standalone .exe with no external dependencies.

I really want to cry when I see the current alternatives... Node/Electron with
dozens of MB of runtime and all that Javascript stuff? What went wrong that we
end up with this?

~~~
ptero
IMO Pascal is a good, clean language and Borland was a top engineering shop
that built Delphi as a rapid development tool that supported _Windows_. At the
time there was nothing comparable for Windows development. There was a huge
marked for Windows consumer applications and games (Linux was not a household
name yet) and very little outside of clumsy Visual Studio to write them. I
recall reading at WSJ at the time that Borland CEO was the only person whom
Bill Gates feared as a competitor.

That said, it was 20 years ago. Now there are IMO much better cross platform
tools for RAD (Python, Tcl/Tk, ...) and Delphi is showing its age (no Linux
targets?). Unless I _have_ to live in a Pascal world there are much better
tools today. My 2c.

~~~
vintagedave
> no Linux targets?

Linux is coming in the next release - there will be a blog on that soon. It
already has Mac, iOS, and Android on top of its Windows support.

Honestly, I do not believe that Python or Tcl/Tk count as "good" RAD cross-
platform tools. Only if you've never used something like modern Delphi to
compare them to. We regularly have customers give feedback about their
productivity with Delphi/C++Builder, versus Python, C#, etc, and they say they
get apps completed and released twice as fast or often more. "5x" is quoted
often in our marketing material, and that number is not marketing, it's based
on numbers people tell us.

\- David (one of the PMs at Embarcadero; I work with the blog author Marco.)

~~~
emcrazyone
They had a Linux port at one time. It was called Kylix
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Kylix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Kylix)

Developing on Linux desktop at that time probably wasn't ready for this.

~~~
geoelectric
There were some other issues then (I worked for Borland at the time, QAing
Kylix) including not really understanding the FOSS community and GPL-the-
social-movement part very well.

There was a particularly big flap over them not stripping the corporate audit
clause from the free Kylix Open Edition version targeted at OSS dev; and
another regarding enforcing the mandatory "Made with Kylix Open Edition"
splash screen that was linked into your app at the compiler level, since all
the library code was technically modifiable per licensing.

I also seem to recall that they managed to standardize on Red Hat 7.2, which I
think had the much maligned gcc 2.96 fork in it and possibly an older glibc,
and then had problems with later kernel/glibc/something along those lines
versions such that you were locked into the "bad" version of Red Hat using it.

I probably have some of the tech details jumbled 16 years later, but the TL;DR
was that the development community for Linux is nothing like the development
community for Windows, especially back then. There were simply different
cultural expectations and a hugely diverse set of environments to target,
along with a swiftly moving ecosystem to link against.

Upshot, Kylix more or less flopped and Borland switched gears to
Java/JBuilder-based IDEs for C++ compilation (C++BuilderX), then back around
full circle later focusing on single-platform IDEs for .NET/native Windows.

------
analognoise
Shout-out to Lazarus/FreePascal. It is like all the best parts of Delphi 5-7,
and it is open source, free, and you can make commercial applications in it!

I have started using it in earnest and it is wonderful - and a company can
never take it away from you; there's no "we're shifting focus..."
announcements. No paid support for broken updates.

I honestly can't recommend it enough.

~~~
ziotom78
I can confirm this. I have used it a couple of years ago for a GUI app I
needed at work (1): Lazarus was a real time saver! When a colleague asked me
if he could use my app under Windows, the porting process was 100% painless:
all the code (~1000 lines of code) recompiled in an instant and the
application worked like a charm.

(1)
[https://github.com/ziotom78/hpview/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/ziotom78/hpview/blob/master/README.md)

------
mamcx
I'm moderator in one of the oldest/largest delphi forum in latin-america:

[http://clubdelphi.com/](http://clubdelphi.com/)

Ironically, I don't use Delphi anymore. Yet, I still help people with it and
defend it when is possible.

Delphi is _amazing_. It only have a HUGE problem: His owners.

You can re4ad why Delphi fade away here: [https://www.quora.com/Why-did-
Borland-fail?share=1](https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Borland-fail?share=1)

"Borland lost its way when executive management decided to change the company
to pursue a different market. ... ... In the height of the enterprise
transformation, I asked Del Yocam, one of many interim CEOs after Kahn, "Are
you saying you want to trade a million loyal $100 customers for a hundred $1
million customers?" Yocam replied without hesitation "Absolutely."

~~~
bsder
> In the height of the enterprise transformation, I asked Del Yocam, one of
> many interim CEOs after Kahn, "Are you saying you want to trade a million
> loyal $100 customers for a hundred $1 million customers?" Yocam replied
> without hesitation "Absolutely."

And he is 100% correct. It's way easier to double the profit from 100
customers than it is 1 million.

~~~
mamcx
Correct only for money. But a language MUST go for reach.

Is no that is bad to try to catch the fat-money, is that them forget the rest.

This make Delphi fade. And impossible to some of us to even continue using it.

\---

The current free version is something new, however this have been try before
but never consistently, so is unsure if I get Delphi free now it will
continue.

This make risky to get it.

------
krylon
I've mentioned it before, but I'll repeat it. ;-)

At work, I inherited maintenance of an in-house application a coworker that
left the company wrote for our accounting department. In Delphi.

When people speak highly of Delphi, they always mention how great the IDE is.
Personally, I am not a big fan of IDEs. I was not disappointed, but my mainly,
what I do is read and edit the source code.

And I have to admit, that part was a pleasant surprise! I had never looked at
or touched Pascal code before, but I was able to make a change to the source -
and it worked, the very first time! - within a few days. And the majority of
that time was spent figuring out how the code was structured[1] and what the
accountants wanted me to do (they always talk to me as if I knew the first
thing about accounting).

But after that, it was smooth sailing. It sure helped that my predecessor
wrote very readable code, but it seems that ObjectPascal made it very easy to
write it that way.

Or, more briefly: Happy Birthday!

[1] The application is about a 10 KLOC in total, which is not small in my
book, but not "very large", either. Also, I was both a developer and a
sysadmin and a helpdesk monkey, so the phone was ringing about every fifteen
minutes.

------
codewritinfool
As a pascal user since the early 80's, then an Object Pascal user, then a
Delphi user since the first version, I love Delphi but to be honest I cannot
afford the yearly updates.

For someone that uses it for home projects, $916 for an upgrade is out of the
question.

Rambling here, but... Delphi 3/5/7 were incredible design packages. I feel
they lost focus when they jumped on the .NET bandwagon - maybe it is just my
perception, but maybe some of their internal developers were less focused on
native code. Anders leaving was also a big hit. Kylix was yet another
distraction.

~~~
marcocantu
For home projects, the Starter edition is free.

~~~
Karunamon
Sure, if you don't want to build UWP apps, or 64 bit apps(!), or OSX apps...
the list[1] goes on.

[1]: [https://www.embarcadero.com/docs/rad-studio-berlin-
feature-m...](https://www.embarcadero.com/docs/rad-studio-berlin-feature-
matrix.pdf)

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

~~~
Elrac
You've reminded me of the reason I loved Delphi's help. I think what I found
most helpful (and most unusual for the "state of the art") was that most help
pages had "see also" links. This allowed me to look up something similar to
what I needed and just follow the links to what I really wanted.

I was able to use the Help pages as (almost?) my sole reference for the API.
Something that just wasn't happening with Delphi's big competitor, VB.

------
madiathomas
I was a Delphi Developer when I started developing software professionally. I
loved programming in it. I jumped ship when Anders Hejlsberg, the Chief
Architect of Delphi moved to Microsoft to be a lead architect of C#.NET. I
used Delphi 6 and 7. When it was time to move to Delphi 8, Borland decided to
target .NET.

The choice was between learning Delphi 8 for .NET or learn Visual Studio .NET.
I chose MS.NET because MS is the custodian of the .NET Framework. They are the
ones on the driving seat, not Borland.

Looking back, I don't regret the move because Delphi is dying. Posts requiring
Delphi are nowhere to be seen on job sites in South Africa.

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

------
interfixus
A shocking aspect of Delphi 1 was the gargantuan executables it insisted on
producing. There was much forum posting and gnashing of teeth.

Hello World ran to about 100 kB.

Funny thing is, I am just getting into Go, and you know what?

~~~
StevePerkins
There's just no way to develop a GUI application (especially a cross-platform
one) without shipping something large.

You can use Electron (and basically bundle Chrome), or JavaFX (and bundle a
Java runtime), and they're about the same size. But even if you ship all of
the Qt dynamic libs, or all of the GTK dependencies, or even wxWidgets... it's
still a far cry from "light".

It just takes tens of megs to make a window appear.

~~~
SyneRyder
It shouldn't ever take that much. This is an example of what a 64kB executable
could accomplish in 2016:

Darkness Lay Your Eyes Upon Me - Conspiracy - Revision 2016 64k

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SEGm2lUSY0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SEGm2lUSY0)

[http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=67106](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=67106)

After watching a few 64k demoscene demos, a 380MB Electron-based minimalist
text editor just seems horribly bloated. (I'm currently writing a cross-
platform Windows/Linux/Mac GUI app in Xojo, and the macOS version is 11.6MB at
the moment.)

~~~
16bytes
The demoscene relies heavily on procedural generation to cram a lot into a
little tiny executable.

GUI toolkits aren't comparable in this regard.

~~~
beagle3
Yes, they are. There are small, concise GUI toolkits that go a long way in a
small volume. I am very fond of FLTK, which IIRC produced standalone
(depending only on system libraries) fast, tens-of-widget-types featured
executables at ~200k on each of Win, Linux and Mac.

Adding Unicode support (independent of the Platform) probably bloats every
executable an additional 100k. The horror.

------
acqq
> I'll start blogging on the Delphi language coming back to Linux tomorrow!

To taste the cross-platform IDE for Rapid Application Development today:

[http://www.lazarus-ide.org/](http://www.lazarus-ide.org/)

[http://www.lazarus-ide.org/index.php?page=whyuse](http://www.lazarus-
ide.org/index.php?page=whyuse)

"Why use Lazarus?

 _No dependencies!_

With Lazarus you can create programs which do not require any platform
dependencies [1]. The result of it is the user of your program does not need
to install any further packages, libraries or frameworks to run your software.

[1] Linux/BSD applications may depend on GTK2 or alternatively QT. Some add-on
packages may also add dependencies of their own

 _Can be used in commercial projects_

Some IDEs restrict their license to only non-commercial development. Lazarus
is GPL/LGPL [2][3] which permits using it in building commercial projects.

[2] LGPL with additional permission to link libraries into your binaries. [3]
Some additional packages come with various licenses such as GPL, MPL, ... "

~~~
jacmoe
Lazarus and Free Pascal has made me return to the wonderful world of RAD and
Object Pascal. :)

I was a Delphi addict in the 90's. After Borland screwed up Delphi - including
the Kylix disaster - and since I am now a full time Linux user - Lazarus is
the only option.

I have been following the Lazarus / Free Pascal project for years, and I think
now is a good time to pick it up.

I wish that it had more traction, though.

~~~
chappi42
No traction because it's a mess. No git, no markdown, no clear organization,
dated look in almost everything. Very unuserfriedly to just 'hop in'. No money
unfortunately and most (all?) devs do it in their sparetime. Splitted between
different attempts, FreePascal, MSE, Oxygene, Smartpascal, Newpascal, maybe
more?

Nevertheless, Lazarus and Free Pascal is very good and important work. Wish
they would modernize to the 21 century though (but whatever works for them is
fine - only it's difficult regarding the traction then).

~~~
jacmoe
I am actively using Lazarus. It is not split into anything other than Free
Pascal (the language) and Lazarus (IDE and visual component library).

Don't blame the forks, mods and spin offs on Lazarus / Free Pascal. It is a
sign that the project is alive and doing well, IMO.

The looks? It looks like any other Qt / GTK 2/3 application. Fairly modern.

But I agree with you on some of the points - but the part that I like the best
is the fact that it's fully open source. It's really nice to be able to look
at the source to everything when developing your own applications.

Yes, the site itself, including the docs, looks dated and does a poor job of
selling it. That's Open Source, the good and the bad.

Edit: The project does have a (mandatory these days, I reckon) Github mirror,
if that would make you more happy. :)

------
brunock222
12 years ago I did a rude system, part of it using Delphi 7.

They still need, once every 6 months, to compile the EXE file with a small
change.

I get paid monthly just to press CTRL+F9 (generate new .EXE file) every 6
months, basically.

I liiiike it :)

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

~~~
mike_hearn
Hah, that's how I started programming too. A bit of BASIC. Then I graduated to
Clipper and Turbo Pascal because that's what my dad used. Then to Delphi 1.0,
then 2.0, I think we skipped 3. Delphi 4 was a mess. Quality got pretty
variable in the later releases.

Imagine being 14 and trying to understand CORBA.

------
frik
I started with QuickBasic/QBasic and Pascal. Though I went with VB4-6 instead
of Delphi.

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

~~~
danarmak
RAD with WinForms was alive and well for many years after in the .Net era.

~~~
soundwave106
Very true, even now. The professional market for WinForms is probably dead,
though.

Yet ironically, I use Winforms in personal code way more today than any of
Microsoft's other GUI technologies. Winforms is a great way to get a Windows
app up extremely quickly that needed a simple GUI. There are plenty of ways to
get a quick command line style app up, but I really don't know too many
solutions that allow you to drag and drop functional GUIs as quickly as
Winforms (other than VB and Delphi).

For a fully fledged app, Winforms makes no sense to me these days. But
Microsoft specific syntax like WPF or UWP no longer makes that much sense to
me either. Might as well spend the time on HTML+CSS+Javascript and get cross-
platform support...

------
pjmlp
Delphi was a great environment, but Anders and other key persons leaving
Borland, while the company lost track which customers they should target,
besides the "clever" idea to change the company's name, killed it.

I know of a few companies in Germany and Netherlands that still use it, but it
is hard to get offers.

And we had to wait 15 years until .NET started to offer a compilation model
similar to Delphi (only for UWP apps).

While Java kind of outsourced it to third party JDK vendors due to Sun's
attitude against AOT compilation, oh well at least Java 9 will bring the first
steps towards support it.

~~~
agentgt
> While Java kind of outsourced it to third party JDK vendors due to Sun's
> attitude against AOT compilation, oh well at least Java 9 will bring the
> first steps towards support it.

I'm just curious. How would AOT improve Java's ability to have better RAD. I
guess I'm just missing the association. Is it bundling/distribution? Startup
time? Integration with native libraries?

I would imagine hot code swap probably doesn't work with AOT (aka JRebel) so
that would hurt RAD.

~~~
pjmlp
Java has worse RAD support than Delphi, yet Delphi AOT compiles to native
code.

AOT compiling to native code, as standard option, would have improved Java's
acceptance as safe language for desktop applications, due to better bundling,
distribution and startup time.

To the point that even Oracle does reckonize this, and is delivering an
initial way of partially AOT compiling on GNU/Linux x64, with support for
other platforms planned for Java 10.

> I would imagine hot code swap probably doesn't work with AOT (aka JRebel) so
> that would hurt RAD.

Sure it does, that can be done with dynamic libraries. Many game engines make
use of this approach.

Other environments like Eiffel and Lisp, have a set of JIT/AOT compilers, JIT
during development and AOT for deployment.

------
aylons
One of the first environments I ever programmed was Delphi. Had lots of fun
with it, and it had a special place in my heart...

Fast forward 20 years, and I'm a hardware developer using Altium a lot. As
some here may be aware, Altium is a multi-gigabit piece of CAD/EDA behemoth
written - and still maintained - in Delphi. 3D, DirectX, everything in Delphi.

Just yesterday and today I had easily reproducible BSODs by using a very basic
feature (routing nets). Memory leaks galore - most people I know have the
habit of shutting Altium down now and then just to avoid a crash. Success is
low - it crashes a lot, I'm getting tired of unhandled exceptions windows.

And this way, I realize even great development tools age badly. Of course this
is not all Delphi's fault, but it shows how tech is a Red Queen's race: you
must run faster and faster to keep in the same place.

~~~
noir_lord
I don't think that really says anything about Delphi and everything about the
massive complexity of large software.

I get regular crashes with a bunch of stuff (everything from Thunar (don't
think that shows C has aged badly), Chrome (C++) and Intellij (Java).

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Some languages make it harder than others, there is a whole class of bugs that
just disappear when you have garbage collection for instance.

~~~
noir_lord
I agree but a large program in one of those languages will still have more
bugs than a small one, that's just the nature of things and the increase in
bugs isn't linear either in my experience.

------
eli_gottlieb
I got my start programming with Delphi 5. It was an excellent environment to
learn in, since I could always see something happening based on what I had
done.

Better: the Delphi component libraries made writing a GUI application _easy_.
I've never seen anything of their quality and ease up through today, and I
still miss being able to get an application running by just subclassing some
standard components and writing the core logic I needed.

------
fredsted
Sometimes I kind of miss Delphi 7. The way it makes it easy to create apps
made programming so fun.

Such a shame it went downhill after the .NET stuff.

~~~
pboschmann
Oh yes, I absolutely loved the tinkering with Delphi and Kylix before I was a
professional programmer. I remember Borland distributed Delphi6 for free for
personal use and I had a lot of fun with it.

In the end I landed a job as a web developer, worked in PSPad and left Delphi
forgotten until the day — a decade or so later after I used Delphi the last
time — I opened Eclipse the first time in my life. Never hated a tool, my
profession and the IT industry more than at that moment… Why take the
compilation so much time? Why are the fonts so ugly? Why does this tool needs
more time at startup than the good old Delphi 6 on my 800 Mhz PC ten years
ago? And why nobody seems to care about it?

~~~
nunobrito
Yep. I don't use Eclipse for these same reasons. It really seems someone hates
IDE and we arrived on hell for paying back something we did in a past life.

I switched to Netbeans. Slightly better: bigger icons, better looking UI. I
like the key combinations there. Still nowhere good compared to Delphi IDE
with useful code snippets built-in and easy-to-use creation of UI apps.

~~~
pboschmann
Netbeans is indeed better. Used it on some mid-size PHP projects and liked its
neat UI and responsiveness. Nowadays I'm a happy IntelliJ user, but hope
Netbeans will stay alive. It's definitely one of the better tools around and
deserves a place under the shiny sun.

------
kweinber
After the death of Python, Oracle and Delphi go really well together... give
it a shot if you want to see the future.

Edit: this is a historical reference... search for "Oracle Delphi Python"

~~~
pryelluw
Missing /s tag? Im not sure if the comment is serious.

~~~
gilgoomesh
I think the comment is referring to Pythia, aka "the Oracle of Delphi", who
could supposedly see the future:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythia)

~~~
pryelluw
Ah I see. Its strange to see the word oracle here used in a positive way.

------
binaryapparatus
I am bit older than average so I used Delphi in its golden days. Even today
few of the old customers need old apps maintained so I keep Delphi 7 ready.

It _is_ great IDE/language.

~~~
noir_lord
When it comes to quickly developing native line of business applications (the
niche between excel spreadsheets and commercial off the shelf) I've still not
seen anything that can beat Delphi, the .Net stuff has gotten very good.

------
mannykannot
Verity Stob has chronicled the tribulations of Delphi enthusiasts in a series
of commentaries:

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/07/borland_ditches_del...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/07/borland_ditches_delphi/)
...
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/20/verity_sons_of_khan...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/20/verity_sons_of_khan_witch_of_wookey/)

------
Joeri
I learned VB3 at 13, and moved to delphi at 14. It was amazing. As easy as VB,
but all the power of C++. I made my own DLL's to use in VB, just because I
could. It was the coolest thing ever.

Fast forward years later, and plenty of intermediate languages (C, C++, Java,
...) I got hired into my first professional software developer job ... as a
delphi developer in a company with a big multi-million line delphi codebase
they wanted to migrate to the web. I had done some web development, so I ended
up writing features on both the delphi and web teams, often the same feature.
So I became intimately familiar with the trade-offs of delphi vs web
development.

The thing about delphi: it was/is insanely productive. In the beginning it
took about 3 to 5 times as long to write a comparable feature on the web side.
It ended up driving me to research cutting edge web dev techniques to find
some way to approach the productivity levels that delphi gave. In the end we
almost got there, using rich frameworks and a component-driven UI. But to this
day the delphi team can still get a feature done faster than the web team, and
that's despite an IDE which is much weaker than webstorm/intellij. Object
Pascal and the VCL are just that good.

However, I wouldn't do a new project in Delphi. You're locked into an ever
more expensive product with an uncertain future, and the productivity
advantages just aren't worth it anymore. You can get close enough using an
open source dev stack, and the value of having all your tools be open and free
is significant.

------
ahacker15
Delphi is still popular in the south of Brazil. It's dying, but slowly.

There's a lot a legacy application written in Delphi here. Some old
programmers, that only know to program in Delphi, may even build new apps with
it.

It may not be that modern today, but there's the "pay the bills" mindset.

I think Delphi will die, but only because it costs a fortune today. If it had
a resonable price, many people would continue to use it indeterminately.

~~~
bdavisx
Just so no one else has to try to find the price (you have to search for it a
little). The cheapest new user price for Delphi is USD $1,405.

~~~
vintagedave
Or $0, if you use the Starter edition. It's free for hobbyists, students,
startups etc, with the clause that if you start making over a certain amount
of revenue you're asked to buy it.

~~~
systems
but it seems and correct me if i am wrong you cannot use the starter edition
to create an application that connects to a database

which in my opinion makes it useless, RAD tools are mostly used to create line
of business applications

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

------
bigtunacan
I never used Delphi, but I have a couple of friends that were die hard Delphi
fanatics. Eventually they moved on to C# as all of the Delphi jobs dried up
with Delphi's continually decreasing use. They still swore how they thought it
was the best thing they ever worked with, but at the end of the day you have
to pay the bills.

Maybe it really is great, I don't know. I was a bit surprised looking at Tiobe
([http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/](http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/)) that
they rank it as the 9th most popular language right now. Where is this
actually being used? And the price tag is incredible!

~~~
TimJYoung
When you're making half a million or more each year writing vertical market
software, the price tag for a Delphi/RAD Studio license each year is
irrelevant. This is especially true when Delphi was the reason why you're
making all that money in the first place.

It's kind of a "you had to have been there..." type of story, but if you get a
chance, talk to a developer that was trying to create Windows applications for
businesses back in the 90's and you will know what I mean. The really sad part
is that while .NET and C# have done an okay job of providing a replacement (I
think that MS has a hard time staying on-point when it comes to dev tools and
make their tools too much of a moving target), you really cannot find anything
exactly like Delphi/RAD Studio today. The primary reason why it's so sad is
that Delphi created millions upon millions of dollars of revenue for
independent software vendors all over the world, and you would think that
companies would be trying to replicate that success. Alas, it's hard to
contemplate even attempting such an endeavor when developer tools are not
valued properly according to the money that they make the developer. If the
software world finds a way to start making money from developer tools again,
then you'll see another Delphi and it will be a _lot_ cheaper.

------
vram22
Somewhat long and interesting thread about Delphi from a while ago, on HN:

Delphi – why won't it die? (2013) (stevepeacocke.blogspot.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613543](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613543)

Did a search in hn.algolia.com just now to find the thread, and it was the top
result when the setting was "By popularity":

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=delphi&sort=byPopularity&prefi...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=delphi&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

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

The latest answer has been annual licenses.

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

------
igivanov
Hey Marco, I still have your Delphi 5 book :-)

FWIIW, where I work, I started using Delphi 5 when it came out. As of now we
have about a dozen D5 desktop applications all essential for the core business
that are in active use and supported as necessary, running happily on Windows
10. I don't see why it won't continue like this for another 15 years... The
bosses (who are non-programmers) don't really care that D5 is out of fashion -
because it all just works (and rocks).

The only reason I couldn't upgrade to a later version (Unicode is one thing
that would be useful) is I am stuck with one critical and long discontinued
grid component.

Looking back I am not sure how we could have lived w/o Delphi. Well maybe it's
an exaggeration, but certainly life would have been more difficult. Everything
else from before .NET/C#/Windows Forms looks like a nightmare.

~~~
kol
> I am stuck with one critical and long discontinued grid component

Try to replace it with Virtual TreeView: [http://www.jam-software.com/virtual-
treeview/](http://www.jam-software.com/virtual-treeview/)
[https://github.com/Virtual-TreeView/Virtual-
TreeView/](https://github.com/Virtual-TreeView/Virtual-TreeView/)

~~~
igivanov
I know about this one and others, thanks. The problem is TopGrid, it is
further customized, so flexible and so entrenched in my code that it would be
an enormous undertaking to replace it. Even if UI was perfectly separated from
the business logic, which it isn't :-)

~~~
Joeri
We ended up switching to cxGrid to move away from delphi 5. It does absolutely
everything, but it can be hard to figure out how to configure it so it does
exactly what you need it to.

------
nnq
Was wondering... is there any modern all-in-one RAD-tool nowadays? And if
not... why?

Has there ever stopped being a need for this?

~~~
zhte415
Half in jest and half seriousness... Excel fill this void for many many things
corporate. Two decades later it is almost as good as Delphi was, just no .exe.

~~~
Havoc
Mind elaborating on this?

I used Delphi for years, now I'm working in Excel all day and I can't quite
see the parallel you're describing?

~~~
zhte415
Sure.

What my former company called 'End User Computing'. This meant developing
small or not-so-small programs in the only tool capable in a corporate
environment: Excel (often linked to SharePoint as a data store). Otherwise
lots of forms and procedures would have to be gone through making it a tech
project.

Background: Operations (not tech) mega-corporate bureaucracy where these apps
were helpers.

Solution: Open up Excel, and start to code and design GUIs on the worksheet
via VBA built in to Excel (and all of Office). It was a stunningly similar
experience to hazy memories of Delphi in terms of GUI and code, but ultimately
was using a spanner to do a screwdriver's job. Memories of Delphi were
certainly hazy at this point, but it was more similar than any other tools I'd
used the the decade+ since that point.

------
jenkstom
I too often see a fundamental misunderstanding of what made Delphi so great.
Yes, you can drag and drop controls onto a form in a lot of tools. It can
compile native code. And yes, Object Pascal was nice to read and maintain.

But the real issue is rapid database applications. Being able to create
business apps very rapidly was always Delphi's thing. It was a really
fantastic replacement for Paradox and brought Turbo Pascal and Paradox
together to create something amazing.

For that there still isn't anything. There are a lot of things that are close,
but nothing with the same level of power and speed. The closest thing I've
found is Django. Hopefully that clarifies: it's not about GUI anything.

------
mmgutz
I remember Borland vs Ms

    
    
        Delphi vs VB
        TASM vs MASM
        Borland C++ OWL vs Microsfot C++/MFC
        Philippe Khan vs Gates
    

Delphi was the raddest RAD tool. The free VCL components for it were often
better than commercial VB ActiveX components. Delphi executables were faster.
Delphi could statically link everything.

I eventually had to move to VB when my Delphi job dried up. VB felt like a
downgrade. I remember constantly referring to Dan Appleman's book so I could
use Win32 APIs to work around the limitations of VB. I'm not knocking VB as
it's one of my favorite tools too, but Delphi was the cream of the crop.

------
melling
"Fastest compiler -- 85,000 lines per minute"

What do you get 22 years later on an Intel i7?

~~~
Havoc
No idea but it was always stupidly fast.

First time I used a C++ compiler I thought it had frozen because the hello
world took so long to compile. The notion that something could compile for
longer than a split second (for trivial things) didn't occur to me.

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

------
reitanqild
I guess I should have started on a greenfield project.

For me it was less rosy.

I remember my boss trying to get me started on Delphi.

We basically had two or three Delphi developer workstations available because
setting up one that could compile the projects we had in our vcs was a three
day task - and it was only possible with the help of our resident Delphi
consultant.

Stuff like that has made me love Maven and Java.

Same goes for Visual Basic that I once used to love.

Still I feel I could have loved it if I didn't start with 10 years of
accumulated references to unsupported packages. :-/

~~~
Joeri
The way delphi finds its units is similar to how java finds its classes, so it
can be smooth sailing or an absolute nightmare depending on how the project is
laid out.

~~~
reitanqild
Unlike how Java finds it classes I have clear memories about installing things
that would update stuff in the registry.

------
orionblastar
I learned UCSD Pascal on an Apple 2e, and then Turbo Pascal on an IBM PC XT in
high school. 1984 to 1986. It helped me learn more languages like Ada, we had
Janus Ada for DOS.

Delphi 1.02 I got from some CD in a UK magazine sold in the USA. They gave
away free copies of commerical software for buying the magazine for $10 or so.

I did better in Visual Basic because I got jobs that required it.

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

------
Havoc
It's good for teaching purposes because it forces a very structured clear line
of thinking.

Not convinced it's still best as a practical language though.

~~~
hsitz
I don't think many ever thought the language itself was ever "the best". It
was the way the libraries and visual components (together, the "VCL") were
designed, and the way things worked within the IDE, that many thought made
Delphi the best. The Delphi/ObjectPascal language on its own, however, was
pretty good.

~~~
Havoc
>It was the way the libraries and visual components (together, the "VCL") were
designed

Agreed. One thing that prevented me from loving python. The language was
great...but how the fk do I get a clickable button without some mish-mash of
half developed 3rd party libraries?

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

------
raister
It rocks to the point of server unavailability.

~~~
marcocantu
Sorry about that, my blog is self-hosted and never gets much traffic --
roughly 100x general volume

~~~
bartread
Might be worth considering fronting it with something like Cloudflare. I pay
them about £20/month and reckon I could handle 10k hits a day on a t2.micro
instance in AWS (in reality I'm actually only getting about 10 - 20 _visitors_
a day myself on the site in question, which I'm quite happy with at the moment
due to reasons).

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

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

------
nottorp
I can't help but notice that all the article talks about is Delphi versions up
to 6... which is where it started to go downhill.

Are recent versions of Delphi actually usable? I haven't tried anything beyond
8, and from my (admittedly rusty) experience the best version was 6.

~~~
hsitz
Back in early 2000's when I used it a lot, the word was that the even numbered
versions of Delphi (2, 4, 6) were all poor efforts, and the odd numbered
(3,5,7) were all good. I used 6 and didn't think it was bad, but 7 was better.
Many Delphi users had remained at version 5.

~~~
kol
6 and 7 were both great.

------
no_wizard
Admittedly I haven't used Delphi but his reminds me of learning to program
with realBASIC (Xojo).

The book with the IDE was free and easy enough to comprehend and it introduced
all the basics of OOP.

Great times. I wonder if lots of people have had this same experience with VB
.NET

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

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

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

------
mrded
Delphi 6 was my first one :)

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

------
b4xt3em4n
The best environment I've used to build software.

------
huan9huan
After several years programming and using Borland, finally, I got to know what
"Turbo" meaning (I am Chinese for not good in English)

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

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

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

------
alsadi
my favorite color is better than yours.

Would someone please point to his/her blog saying that Tcl/tk being the
universal scripting language?

~~~
jacmoe
Do you know who Marco Cantu is? Apparently not. ;)

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

------
avodonosov
ah, Delphi...

