
Delphi Chief Scientist Allen Bauer Has Left Embarcadero/Idera - omnibrain
http://blog.therealoracleatdelphi.com/2016/02/a-new-adventure.html
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minsight
Idera bought a company that I used to work for out. They terminated about half
of the people without severance (well, you could get severance if you were
still out of work after 36 weeks). The rest were kept on in case Idera's
employees needed to consult with them about absorbing the purchased IP. The
rest were let go about two months later.

Idera buys companies and outsources all further development after they've
assimilated the source code and the build process.

Embarcadero's employees were doomed from the moment the takeover was
announced.

~~~
omnibrain
Yes, the future looks really bleak. Allen Bauer claimed wrote on G+: "There
are no plans that I'm aware of to move someone into my old position... All
those that I would consider qualified are either already gone or are currently
looking elsewhere.﻿"
[https://plus.google.com/u/0/104660942073125276831/posts/AuEU...](https://plus.google.com/u/0/104660942073125276831/posts/AuEUb95pUZu)

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desireco42
Huge respect for Turbo Pascal and Delphi. What later came out of it,
essentially was contrary to the spirit of those two, as others pointed out.

Turbo Pascal in a way is still way more featured environment than many
available, with step debugger and profiler and decent editor. It touched a lot
of developers and for that I will always be grateful.

I think it is about time, it dies and not soil any more memories of glory
days.

~~~
pjmlp
A pastime of mine in the golden days was to proove C guys how C features
impossible in Pascal were actually available in Turbo Pascal.

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pjmlp
This is really sad.

Thanks to the experience with Turbo Basic and Turbo Pascal I never worshipped
C.

Their C++ developer experience was also quite good. Only now has Microsoft
with C++/CX + XAML kind of approached the same experience.

Never got to use Delphi in anger past version 1.x as by then I was mostly busy
with C++.

Quite sad to see Delphi die like this, but a small part of its soul lives in
C# anyway.

~~~
giancarlostoro
Agreed. I never got to enjoy Delphi but some of it's beautiful capabilities
found their way into C#. I only hope it's old architects either work on
something new and interesting (like Rust) maybe a more approachable
alternative to Pascal or contribute to FreePascal (would be great).

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rbranson
Wow. Delphi was one of the first programming environments that I found was
productive. It's amazing that the company has continued to chug along in the
face of the web, mobile apps, massively dominant platform players like
Microsoft and the low barrier to entry of the open source world.

~~~
pjmlp
They were surviving on enterprise contracts most likely.

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giancarlostoro
I never could get into Delphi, it's quite a hefty cost whereas I can try other
languages for free. Heck I can get Visual Studio Ultimate for free as a
student or even a business. I guess I could try FreePascal / Lazarus but it's
missing a bit of documentation.

~~~
orionblastar
That is the downfall of Delphi, they didn't adapt to market trends. When free
and open source languages challenged it, they didn't make a free version.
Other FOSS IDEs came out and took away business from them.

Delphi was good in the 1990s and competed with Visual BASIC. Those were the
salad days. Now Delphi is more of a niche market as people moved on to
different languages and platforms.

Kylix I think was the Linux version of Delphi. It didn't do so well.

~~~
giancarlostoro
I am still surprised they don't somehow try to team up with FreePascal /
Lazarus to benefit from their work and bring financial support, they could do
something along the lines of what JetBrains does where they have an Open
Source IDE and a community IDE that's open sourced. Part of me would still
love to learn Delphi / Pascal if they ever got back into line because of
native RAD development, it really makes making a GUI based application so much
simpler. Sure we have Java and .NET but it's not the same feeling as a native
application (not always).

~~~
orionblastar
Yeah Free Pascal and Lazarus don't do the full Turbo Pascal and Delphi Object
Oriented Pascal features.

I was going to write a book on Free Pascal, and an Intro to Pascal using Free
Pascal. But my Pascal skills are so out of date it would only be text based
code and not OOP. Free Pascal and Lazarus need some books written on them. But
I'm not skilled enough to write them.

There used to be a Borland Museum that gave away DOS versions of Turbo Pascal,
Turbo C, Turbo C++ etc. I think the current link is here:
[http://edn.embarcadero.com/museum/](http://edn.embarcadero.com/museum/)

I haven't tried it in a while. They have the specs on Delphi 1.0 but never
gave away Delphi 1.0 which would have been a 16 bit Windows program.

I've seen versions of Delphi on Bit Torrent sites, but I stay away from
pirated software. Sometimes the cracks are infected with viruses. Better to
stay with Free Pascal and Lazarus instead. Besides Free Pascal and Lazarus are
cross platform. Delphi isn't cross platform.

Trade Wars Game Server is still written in Delphi, it is based on the old BBS
Tradewars 2002 written in Turbo Pascal.
[http://www.eisonline.com/](http://www.eisonline.com/) They went from modem
connections to Internet Telnet connections. People still play it and buy it.

~~~
giancarlostoro
Ironically FreePascal was written on a free version of Turbo Pascal until it
was self-compiling (or whatever the phrase is) when they decided to stop
making the free versions. I feel the same about pirated software. Besides,
once you get enough into programming piracy doesn't seem right, in some cases
you're either recoding it for yourself or you realize there was genuine work
put into the software to the point where piracy just feels wrong completely.

~~~
orionblastar
Piracy feels wrong because programmers worked hard to get the code working and
deserve to earn money from the sales of the software from their company.

Some people used piracy to try a software program before they decide to buy
it. For example Microsoft Windows was pirated by BBS systems, and it got
popular and pirates would buy their own copy after trying it out first. People
who pirated Windows 3.X for example, went on to buy Windows 95 when it came
out.

I used to work for PC Shops and they would give us copies of floppies with MS-
DOS and Windows on it to install for customers without paying Microsoft OEM
fees. This was before activation keys and online activation. I felt bad about
doing it, but if I used a legit version and charged for it I'd be fired. It
was custom PC and AT systems with parts made in China and Taiwan and sometimes
a 386 as well when they could afford it.

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epx
Sad. Turbo Pascal and later Delphi were immensely popular in Brazil in 90s and
2000s. Many small software houses depended on it. I had a bunch of old Turbo
Pascal / Objectvision (I think that was the name) manuals, and a guy actually
bought them from me because they were useful for his small team (I put them to
sale thinking about collectors).

~~~
rimantas
I think if was Turbo Vision.

~~~
pjmlp
Turbo Vision was for MS-DOS and Object Windows Library for Windows 3.x

Then came Delphi with Visual Components Library.

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insulanian
Delphi was the most productive dev environment I ever worked in. It was sad to
watch it slowly dying all these years...

~~~
insulanian
And I have to mention David Intersimone (a.k.a DavidI) [1] - Delphi evangelist
for last 30 years. Respect!

[1] [https://twitter.com/davidi99](https://twitter.com/davidi99)

