
Delphi's 25th Birthday - mustafabisic1
https://community.idera.com/developer-tools/b/blog/posts/25-years-of-excellence
======
mickeyp
I loved Delphi. It was amazing. But then they ate their own future by going to
the stratosphere with enterprisey tool acquisitions nobody remembers the names
of any more; then they fell back down to earth, and flirted with Kylix --
Delphi for linux -- but at a time of great upheaval in the linux desktop
world, and it never really took off either.

Meanwhile, the former creator of Delphi had left for MS and created C# that at
the time was already beating Delphi at its own game.

By the mid 2000s Delphi was already dead in the water: poor unicode support,
no 64-bit compiler, and a language that hadn't innovated much since the 90s.

It's a shame, really. Delphi in the 90s was on its way to rule the world. Only
then suddenly it wasn't.

~~~
altmind
I still remember interbase, now called firebird. Of course, sqlite is much
more prominent today for an embeded database, but for the times without
sqlite...

~~~
weavie
Interbase was a proper client server db. If you wanted embedded you needed
Paradox. Ah, I have many happy memories of pulling all nighters repairing
corrupted Paradox files...

~~~
barrkel
No, you can (dynamically) link Interbase into your app, so the server runs in-
process. You can also do it with Firebird:
[https://www.firebirdsql.org/pdfmanual/html/ufb-cs-
embedded.h...](https://www.firebirdsql.org/pdfmanual/html/ufb-cs-
embedded.html)

~~~
weavie
Was it always that way? My memory is failing me.. I'd hate to think those
nights in the 90's were completely wasted!

~~~
nottorp
I vaguely remember that Interbase was a proper client/server thing at first.
I'm pretty sure we were using Paradox databases with all their quirks in
1998-2000, including support people fixing broken db files for customers.

------
gyulai
I used to love Delphi in the late 90s, and if someone could do a
late-90s-Delphi-like experience for programming UI-heavy software today, and
do it right, and in a way that properly integrates with the anno 2020 tech
landscape, then I would love to use such a thing.

In a bout of late 90s nostalgia, I convinced my then-employer in 2011 to buy a
license for the professional version of Delphi for a software project I was
doing, and I was just absolutely shocked about how far it had fallen behind
the curve. It seemed that attempting to support a modern tech ecosystem while
maintaining some semblance of backwards-compatibility was giving it the worst
of both worlds. Add to that enterprise bloat.

I don't know what it's like today, but I sincerely hope that someone will get
it back on the right track (or has already done so, as I haven't retried since
my experience in 2011).

~~~
vintagedave
> I sincerely hope that someone will get it back on the right track (or has
> already done so ...

2020 Delphi supports five platforms, has 64-bit compilers everywhere, has
modern language features, interoperates with C++ through C++Builder, and more.
In the past few years especially, we've* seen both a lot of work on it, and
increasing interest in using it.

It's modern, and used more widely than one might realise.

* "We've": This is a personal HN account but I work on Delphi and C++Builder.

~~~
gyulai
Thanks for chiming in! I'll give it another spin, if I get some time.

~~~
gyulai
...although language features, 64bit, and integration with C++ were never
really where my quarrels were.

If we take "rapid application development" out of its trademarked context,
applying just its common-sense meaning, and applying it to the year 2020, then
the modern tech ecosystem that one would want to integrate with is clearly not
C++, but rather maybe JavaScript & the browser ecosystem, Python, and low-
overhead JVM langauges like Scala or Groovy.

The next thing that immediately jumps out at me is that the form designer is
still using pixel-based positioning, instead of layout managers and units of
length that we know from html, like em (fontsize-based), or vh/vw (percent of
view-height/view-width), etc.

I was trying to research these things more extensively just now, but giving
you my name, street address, company, phone number, and then "Error: Field
required: Yes, I would like to receive marketing communications" for
downloading the COMMUNITY edition? Come on! Enterprise bloat: Check.

~~~
gyulai
Haha. 10 minutes further into my Delphi-in-2020-exploration (60% of which was
the time that the installer actually took), this was the sequence of events:

* Hit the installer and switched windows, to let the installer work in the background.

* Installer mysteriously gone.

* Tried to run the programme, and it took some digging to understand that the product seems to be in a half-installed state.

* Re-run the installer. This time, keeping the installer in the foreground. Now it works.

* Started Delphi.

* Dropped a button in the form designer to start playing around.

* Oh gosh. Form designer still using pixel-based layouts.

* Deleted the button.

* Doing some Googling to figure out how to do layout managers, and found an interesting youtube tutorial on something called TGridLayout.

* Dropped a TGridLayout on my form.

* Form Designer now caught in an infinite loop bringing up an Error modal that says "Control TButton($17EE2200) has no parent window. Path: ~TButton($17EE2200)".

Thanks Delphi! See you again, another 10 years from now.

~~~
gyulai
...feels like a relationship with an old friend who you've lost touch with
when he became an alcoholic, but every now and again you feel bad for him and
think you owe him a meeting.

------
sysrpl
For those interested, Free Pascal and Lazarus, the free open source
implementation of Delphi, is amazing. It has an active development community
and works on most all platforms.

[https://www.getlazarus.org/learn/tutorials/introduction/](https://www.getlazarus.org/learn/tutorials/introduction/)

~~~
bmn__
> Free Pascal and Lazarus […] is amazing.

No, it is less than mediocre. It has not kept up at any sufficient pace to
other languages and environments. Just a small excerpt because I don't have
the nerve to write an exhaustive critique: bignum, first-class functions,
generators, lazy lists, lexical scope, macros, namespaces. Single window in
Lazarus requires recompilation that errors out in CheckLst.pas instead of
being a preference somewhere in a menu.

~~~
bjoli
What are your issues with scope in FPC? Namespaces have been supported since
3.0.

The other things I understand though. I much prefer Pascal syntax and
compilation time, but I have started reaching for c++ these days

~~~
bmn__
> What are your issues with scope in FPC?

Simple begin/end should create a scope, cf. { … } in ES6 or Perl. Instead, to
make it work, the programmer has to nest named procedures.

> Namespaces have been supported since 3.0.

Sorry, I did not notice. Apparently it's been available for 5 years, but the
standard library or other popular libraries did not adopt the feature.

------
moomin
I find it ironic they describe it as “25 Years of Excellence” because, as much
as people go on about the competition, what really broke Delphi was its poor
quality control

I bloody loved that language, but all of the components had serious errors
that resulted in crashes. To make it worse, they are their own dog food,
meaning the IDE itself crashed all the time.

This wouldn’t have been so bad, but then VB5 happened, which was much, much
worse semantically but absolutely rock solid.

Of course, then C# happened, but devs like me had already left the ecosystem.
(And the less said about all that bundled cruft the better.)

~~~
TsomArp
Never had the problems you mention till Delphi 7.

~~~
thu2111
Delphi was pretty notorious for having some sort of tick/tock quality problem,
for unclear reasons. Presumably some kind of botched project management inside
Borland.

Delphi 1 was a mess. Delphi 2 was rock solid. Delphi 3 was a buggy mess.
Delphi 4 kind of recovered things but was never as good as Delphi 2. By this
point we'd figured out the pattern and skipped Delphi 5, if I recall
correctly.

~~~
mobilio
5 and 7 was solid...

1 was 16 bits only. 2 turn to 32 bits AFAIK.

------
dvh
What killed Delphi is $3000 per seat cost. Single starting developer or
students cannot afford that. So there is no community and it's impossible to
find Delphi programmers.

~~~
bencoder
They used to give it away. I learnt to program from a free magazine cover-disk
Delphi, and its excellent help system.

~~~
vintagedave
We give it away now too :) There is a Community edition, where the license
terms are basically that you should buy it only if you make significant
revenue. Students, hobbyists, early stage startups etc - free.

[https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter](https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter)

~~~
notriskfree
Too bad you don't actually let us reinstall the software we already paid for.

~~~
vintagedave
Not sure what you mean there, sorry.

~~~
notriskfree
It is quite simple. I mean that if you install the software N times; perhaps
because you often switch and rebuild machines; and you do not have a current
subscription; Dennis in tech support will not reset your license registration
limit; and you will never be able to install the software again.

~~~
vintagedave
If that happened, it is an error. I believe the flow these days is to go
through Sales, but you do _not_ have to buy or have a current subscription to
install.

I'll repeat that: You can install a hundred times if you need. You do _not_
have to buy or have a current subscription to install.

The license server counts installations and flags for verification after a
certain number because it's quite common for people to install far more times
(ie, for more people) than they actually bought. All that is required after
you install a one-person license enough times to trigger the server asking
questions is to contact us and let us know you really are using it legally.
Then you're good to go.

------
imagine99
A while ago I got to do some consulting/auditing for a couple of companies in
the medical field, and looking under the hood of their infrastructure, I was
surprised to see that two of their most important apps for daily use (one a
scheduling/filing/CRM behemoth, one a 3D analysis program) are developed in
Delphi. You couldn't tell it from the GUI but in one program directory I saw a
VERY familiar ico on an exe and my interest was piqued). I went so far as to
put one through a decompiler (IDR) to find out which version of Delphi had
been used.

So, it seems that Delphi is alive, kicking serious butt and making some
companies loads of money, developing beautiful modern enterprise apps.

I, like many others, got my start in programming with early Delphi versions in
school - Delphi 3 truly was my first love and I recognize the splash screens
that are currently on display at
[https://delphi.embarcadero.com](https://delphi.embarcadero.com) up until
Delphi 2007, but 6 and 7 give me a warm, fuzzy feeling. We parted ways in the
mid-2000s but I can honestly say, I never got back that feeling of joy and
love for a language and a programming environment that I had for Pascal and
Delphi (then again, I never had to deal with any messy legacy projects and
component issues back then which surely drove some developers nuts).

Anyway... seeing that Delphi is still alive and watching a few YouTube videos
about the new features it got over the last 10 years, including the stunning
cross-platform development options for Android, iOS, web and PC (and
apparently you can integrate with Sencha ExtJS, although I'm still unclear on
how), I downloaded the free Delphi Community Edition - which is GREAT - and
knocked out a beautiful little client-server app for a PoC over a weekend.
Could hardly fathom the adrenaline rush I got from that...

I'm seriously considering putting in a purchase request for the Architect
edition now... buying that at full price used to be a dream of teenage me and
I think it's not even as expensive as I remember :-) Can't really justify it
but then again, it's a chicken-egg problem and you've got to start somewhere.

You probably can't say that out loud, it being heresy and whatnot, but I could
imagine that even now, schools could get more students to develop a love for
programming on a wider and more versatile scale with Delphi Community Edition
rather than Java or Python... There I said it, pls don't kill.

~~~
vintagedave
> I downloaded the free Delphi Community Edition - which is GREAT - and
> knocked out a beautiful little client-server app for a PoC over a weekend.
> Could hardly fathom the adrenaline rush I got from that...

I'm one of the product managers who works on Delphi today (together with Marco
Cantù. I actually work on C++Builder, Delphi's sister product.) I am _really
happy_ to hear that.

Your question about Sencha: we recommend using Sencha for web front-ends, and
we have a server product written with Delphi for creating REST services or
converting your desktop apps to REST-based backends, called RAD Server.

> I could imagine that even now, schools could get more students to develop a
> love for programming on a wider and more versatile scale with Delphi
> Community Edition rather than Java or Python... There I said it, pls don't
> kill.

It's widely used in non-English-speaking countries for education today. I too
expect it would be much better than Java for learning.

~~~
bnastic
Ah, C++ Builder... Borland wasn't afraid to patch the language (hello
closures!) to get the features they needed. I loved that IDE, it made me a
decent amount of money back in the day and it was ridiculously easy to get a
full featured desktop application up and running, sprinkled with some Paradox
on top it could do a lot! I will have to give it another look today, if
nothing else then just to check who's aged better - the tool or the programmer

------
mhd
Delphi was great for developing custom solutions for middle class companies.
Not end-user stuff, but no enterprise either. That kind of software vanishing
coincides with that whole business sector getting smaller.

From a technical perspective, it was my favorite attempt to tame a often
horrible mess of half-baked database design and ad-hoc solutions -- you can do
spaghetti code in every language, but the Delphi apps I saw were usually a bit
better than their FoxPro/Access/FileMaker/VB equivalents.

~~~
TsomArp
I don't see your point. Skype was done in Delphi, and it was pretty much end-
user and very successful. There are many other apps: Skype, Nero Burning Rom,
WinRAR, Partition Magic, Panda Titanium Antivirus, TuneUp Utilities, Aida64,
BeyondCompare, Total Commander, CloneDVD, Ultra ISO, KMplayer, Gold Wave,
Sound editor. And I am sure there are many others.

~~~
sysrpl
Here are a few more: fl studio, convert x to dvd, homesite, spybot search and
destroy, resource hacker, innosetup, and originally mysql workbench

~~~
mhd
Siege of Avalon was a pretty great RPG written in Delphi, now open-sourced[1]
(no work done on it since ages). I remember liking that it was somewhat
"mundane", i.e. upgrading your armor didn't mean that you start out with
knightly full plate and it goes all out fantastic after that.

[1]: [http://soaos.sourceforge.net/](http://soaos.sourceforge.net/)

------
bartels_media
Congratulations!

We love making our software with Delphi since 2002 and it always provided us
with a rock solid foundation until today.

In those 18 years (>2.000.000 downloads) we never had a single critical
failure. Ever.

The rapid prototyping capabilities help us to design and _experience_ user
interface in no time.

Firemonkey allows us to create Mac & Windows multi-plaform software from a
single code base.

As a commercial software company that needs the job done reliable and
efficient, Delphi just never disappointed us.

Yes, we know there is #C, .NET, Java but we see no need to change something
that just works so well.

Cheers, Bartels Media from Germany

------
ZoomZoomZoom
Still, to this day, I know of no other solution that beats Lazarus+Free Pascal
in easiness of stitching together a cross-platform GUI program and just works
out of the box.

------
pritambarhate
Do you guys think that closed source general-purpose programming languages
have any future? In the late 90s and early 2000s both Java and C# were closed
source. Still, they became highly successful. Today many people wouldn't even
touch a language or a framework to build a business on unless it's Open
Source. It's surprising how the programming landscape has changed in the past
20 years.

~~~
thu2111
.NET only became open very recently, it's been quite successful. The entire
iOS/Apple developer ecosystem is closed source of course. Maybe Swift isn't
but nobody uses it outside the Apple platform.

You could argue Microsoft is an exception and them opening .NET shows the end
of that era though.

The "open source or nothing" mentality might change in future. It means
there's not much market for developer tools, so everything gets hacked
together out of random "frameworks" found on GitHub that are here today, gone
tomorrow when the bored developer at Netflix or Google gets their desired
promo and moves on. There's no real planning or design, just whatever random
stuff tech firms throw in the mix as a side effect of other projects, which is
why HTML has virtual reality support but no table or spreadsheet view worth a
damn.

~~~
exikyut
Hmmm. Agreeing with the sentiment of your argument while looking at the flip
side of the coin, the fruit borne of the ad-hoc lack of coordination you
describe is sadly easily overwhelmed by domain domination exerted from
committees and bureaucracies with vested interests in specific fields.

Which kind of information-leaks that either VR is hype noone really cares
about, or that none of said committees (with attendant lumbering bureaucracy)
have really noticed it yet. Wait, I just described the same thing two
different ways.

But yeah, no, it would not do to have The Web℠ Platformᴳ, errrrr, " _excel_ ".
:P

~~~
thu2111
Yes, there's a certain robustness that comes from an evolutionary approach.
And some of the web's competitors died because they couldn't (in my view)
correctly analyse and match the web's strengths, because those strengths were
never planned or written down anywhere. Figuring out why the web is strong is
sort of like trying to figure out how our own bodies work. Sure, we can see
the component parts. How they come together to make the whole a success is
often less clear.

On the other hand, let's not kid ourselves. The web wasn't actually built by
making a melting pot of diverse ideas with an evolutionary process to select
between them. The web has always been controlled by one dominant company, and
the stuff that gets added (or not) reflects the agenda of their internal
committees. The web went from being controlled very, very briefly by Tim BL to
being controlled by Netscape who added forms, cookies, JavaScript, CSS etc.
Then to Microsoft, who added a pile of other stuff and then _froze development
for years_ whilst Mozilla tried to get off the ground.

Mozilla added relatively little to the web given the resources invested into
Firefox; virtually all their energy went into trying to fix their own
architectural mis-fires. Then WebKit came along and very briefly Apple was in
charge. That era didn't last long until Google came along and took the crown,
which they've had ever since. Unlike Apple and Mozilla, Google actually have
added a lot of stuff to the web platform but it reflects a consumer driven
agenda. Hence WebVR, WebRTC etc.

To the extent the other players exerted any influence on the Chrome team
during this time it's - in my view - been mostly negative. Mozilla lost to
Chrome because their technical choices just weren't that good, but they've
continued to exercise outsized influence on decision making despite dwindling
market share.

Additionally the lack of any real support for libraries or dependencies in the
web platform means many of the new APIs added to HTML can't be challenged by
competitors. WebAudio sucks but nobody can make a better one because of the
sandbox.

In the end the web isn't really the result of ad-hoc coordination so much as a
dysfunctional lurching tug-of-war between different groups of engineers who
all work down the road from each other at different firms in California (with
a detour through Seattle).

------
martin_a
Wow, 25 years. Wasn't onboard right from the start but something like Delphi 4
or 5 when I was in school. Ended that "career" with some cracked version of
Delphi 7 Enterprise (obviously one needed the biggest version as a 16 year
old!). I have good memories of Delphi, was my start into programming. Nice to
see it's still around.

~~~
ansgri
I've basically learned programming and database design in Delphi 7, using a
couple of thick textbooks + Win32 API reference (.chm; no internet back then
for us). The smoothest developer experience (build, GUI design, debug) I've
ever had. Despite I had a rather mediocre PC at that time, it was snappier
than anything modern, save for not-quite-IDEs like VS Code.

~~~
martin_a
The experience was awesome! Just hit F9, if I remember correctly, and
everything worked (sometimes). Export as a .exe and you were good to go.

Maybe I should get into it again, not sure. :-D

------
wiz21c
In case you still want to work with it : [https://www.lazarus-
ide.org/](https://www.lazarus-ide.org/)

~~~
pjmlp
Actually, if one wants to try out Delphi,

[https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter](https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter)

Lazarus and FreePascal are great, but they aren't 100% Delphi.

~~~
chungy
They also have a significantly lower barrier to entry. Just by scanning the
Delphi page, I'm guessing the free one doesn't include the Linux version as
advertised for the big for-pay editions. And the download is hidden behind a
registration form. blah.

~~~
wila
Professional doesn't even include the Linux version. You need to buy
enterprise for that...

------
m0zg
I made my first substantial, steady paycheck with Delphi. It was pretty great
for its time, and it really lowered the barrier for entry into programming,
and especially GUI-based programming. I wasn't a huge fan of Pascal, so I
ended up continuing to work in C++ Builder, but this stuff was _such_ a breath
of fresh air back when Microsoft tooling sucked real bad, and Visual Studio
was not "visual" at all. There were entire sites chock full of reusable
Delphi/C++ Builder components that you could just download and easily
integrate into your code. Then Borland lost Anders Hejlsberg, and Microsoft
gained Anders Hejlsberg, and within a few years we saw C# (clearly inspired by
Object Pascal) and Windows Forms (clearly inspired by VCL).

~~~
tenant
MS Visual Basic had windows forms as long as Delphi if not longer and long
long before .net came along.

~~~
lmz
I think that was referring to "Windows Forms" the .NET library, not Windows
forms in general.

~~~
tenant
OK but I've used vb6, vb.net, Delphi (and Lazarus) and they are all pretty
much identical in terms of dropping in controls onto a form, writing event
handler code and setting properties. So to claim that delphi's vcl is clearly
the inspiration for this in .net is a bit of a stretch.

~~~
m0zg
They are very similar architecturally and in terms of language features, to
the point where someone with Object Pascal background would feel right at
home. Also it was the first Microsoft visual UI design framework backed by a
_real_ programming language.

------
magicalhippo
At work our main product is all Delphi, some 300kLOC not counting the
components and libraries (DevExpress, SecureBlackBox etc).

There's been more and more talk about moving to something else, but a complete
rewrite would likely be a death sentence so...

Still, for whipping up some quick GUI that does file IO and/or DB stuff
there's not much that beats it. Though having to consume REST APIs or similar
newfangled things is not such a pleasurable experience.

~~~
chadcmulligan
Whats the problem with the REST Api's, I haven't tried it but thought it would
just be a matter of dropping some TDataSources and so on?

~~~
magicalhippo
The built-in REST library is verbose and tedious, and it doesn't do HTTP
pipelining which means any non-trival API over HTTPS will be slow as a dodo
(though maybe they fixed this recently, haven't checked latest version).

In addition, the built-in JSON stuff is also tedious to use, I found
SecureBlackBox's variant with some class helper to provide basic XPath-like
access to be quite a lot more ergonomic to use. But JSON still feels like an
impedance mismatch.

~~~
chadcmulligan
Thanks for the info

------
tibbydudeza
I started my lifelong love of coding with Turbo Pascal.

At the time we coded on a Sperry Univac 1100 system at varsity and it took
bloody ages to compile/debug/run programs.

When I got a loaner PC and a copy of Turbo Pascal it was so amazing and fast.

~~~
dugmartin
When I started in college in 1989 our school had an IBM mainframe with
terminals where you would type in your Pascal code and submit a compile job
and if there were bugs you would get a green bar paper printout that you had
to go across campus to get. Through a friend I was able to get a official IBM
file upload utility (he was in IBM’s summer sales rep program) and figured out
that Turbo Pascal also compiles the (UCSD?) flavor of Pascal that the
mainframe ran. While everyone else was doing the compile-print-walk loop
(there were no terminals in the building with the big mainframe chain printer)
I was interactively debugging my code in Turbo Pascal on my Tandy 1000 in my
dorm room and then uploading it over dialup. It was awesome.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
What kind of insane university has the terminals in a different building from
the printers?

I'm going to guess that the staff didn't have to use those terminals, only the
students did.

------
sharken
From a developer viewpoint i can name three things that have stopped Delphi
from competing with languages such as C# and JAVA.

1\. No Garbage Collector. While some understanding of object lifetime is
required, the constant need to manage allocation and de-allocation of objects
takes a lot of energy away from the writing code.

2\. Naming variables in a separate Var block. This is really cumbersome and
detracts from the development experience. This was somewhat fixed in Delphi
10.3 which was released in 2018 or rather 23 years after the first Delphi
version.

3\. The unrealistic pricing of Delphi. The high cost of licensing has
throughout the times meant that other programming languages have been chosen
on this fact alone.

If (1) and (3) could be fixed then Delphi might stand a chance to gain
significant market share.

~~~
nottorp
Agree with 3.

1 sounds like you need to get experience on more platforms though. Maybe try
to work on a memory restricted platform using a GC language and see how it
fucks you over. Anyway, look beyond the javascript "ecosystem".

And while 2 can be mildly annoying, there's a reason Borland compilers are so
fast, and that's the somewhat restricted syntax of the language.

~~~
sharken
Don’t know what relevance the JavaScript ecosystem has. I would pick a
language with a GC any day and then deal with issues later on, than to
struggle every bit of the way without a GC IMO.

------
pjmlp
Happy Birthday Delphi!

If Borland's management hadn't messed up, .NET and Java probably would never
had taken off on PC world.

~~~
oneweekwonder
I'm sure there was management issues in the 90's. But I'm of the opinion
Borland's fate had a lot to do with Microsoft's embrace, extend, and
extinguish strategies of the era.

~~~
pjmlp
If you ever listed or read Anders interviews, those management issues are also
one of the reasons he ended up leaving Borland.

Most university students in Portugal during the 90's would also gladly accept
Microsoft job offers.

I always find ironic that the companies that sold out to Microsoft are always
the victims, the poor souls never did anything wrong.

~~~
nottorp
I think there was a news/gossip item back in the day that MS offered him
1M/year and Borland/Inprise refused to even come close to matching that. Their
loss.

------
dana321
Someone wrote a full audio tracker with ASIO, VST etc. in delphi in the 90s; a
pretty impressive feat.

Its still avaliable:
[http://www.madtracker.org/main.php](http://www.madtracker.org/main.php)

Thread talking about it:
[https://www.madtracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=180&sid=7df...](https://www.madtracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=180&sid=7dff0c87463a4114348aeb21d869201c)

~~~
nottorp
Well, as opposed to your average RAD medium, in Delphi you could even sprinkle
pieces of assembly in the middle of your Pascal code.

So you could basically do anything with it, all the time not worrying about
aligning buttons on a form because it was piss easy.

~~~
dana321
Yeah, i spoke to the guy who wrote it and he used a lot of assembly
optimization.

------
wdb
Delphi, great tool, to write apps in. I can still remember the
anticipation/excitement of my dad when he discovered Sibyl was being build.
Delphi for OS/2! I found an interesting article about it:
[http://www.edm2.com/index.php/Sibyl,_a_Visual_Development_En...](http://www.edm2.com/index.php/Sibyl,_a_Visual_Development_Environment_for_OS/2)

My dad used OS/2 for a long time :)

------
ablekh
Ah, sweet Delphi ... To this day, it remains the best visual development
environment that I have experienced over 25+ years. Powerful - yet intuitive
and simple - UI, blazingly fast compilation speed, rich sets of built-in and
third-party visual component libraries. I have started with Turbo Pascal,
which was certainly the breakthrough at the time, and have also worked with
C++ Builder and a bit with Interbase & Firebird, but spent most of my Borland
ecosystem time with Delphi. Recently, looking for potential better (Delphi-
like) alternatives to modern convoluted world of Web development, I have
explored Lazarus and several related projects, but none of them seems to
provide the same comprehensive-yet-intuitive solution (backed by a solid
company) that Delphi has done in the desktop development world. Perhaps, some
good relevant projects will emerge in the future, but, until then, I will
focus on mastering one of the "standard" modern Web development stacks (e.g.,
TypeScript + Vue) as well as exploring quite promising Blazor and, generally,
WebAssembly technologies.

------
schnable
I basically learned how to program using Delphi 2, as a 16 year old who
somehow ended up writing the LOB software for a small business owned by a
family friend. Lots of good memories of that. My career would probably be
farther behind if Delphi didn't provide all the pieces to write a reasonable
client-server application out of the box.

------
fortunajs
annual birthday party didn’t happen though - one developer couldn’t make it
due to sickness and the second one decided not to go not wanting to feel alone
;-)

~~~
pjmlp
At least in what concerns German community, there would be a couple more
showing up.

Delphi is alive over here, even if only on corporations with big pockets.

~~~
zerr
It was (is?) also popular in eastern Europe, especially considering a relaxed
attitude towards copyright laws - even gov and public schools used to run
(still run?) illegal copies :)

------
davidhbolton
I learnt Pascal at Uni in the late 1970s and programmed in Turbo Pascal from
1986 on and then Delphi D2 since 1997. Slightly off-topic but two of my
applications written in Turbo Pascal:Warlord and Quest, in the period
1988-1990 are still in use today. Both are postal games now run on the
internet by kjcgames.com.

I'm currently maintaining and extending a major proptech application with 1.3
million loc of Delphi (XE7). Not so long ago the firm bought another firm with
its own a 1.3 million loc of D7 code! There's still a lot of Delphi code
about.

------
stockerta
I programmed a lot 20 years ago as a hobby. I started at 13 with TP7 and some
pascal books borrowed from my older brother. Later I "got" Delphi 1 and 3.
Crated some smallish programs for myself, like a magic card db program when I
started to play mtg. Fun times.

~~~
mobilio
I start with TP 5.0 or 5.5.

~~~
pjmlp
Same here, my introduction to OOP was preparing an high school class
presentation about Turbo Pascal 5.5 new OOP features.

I ought to Pascal being introduced to systems programming and OOP in a much
saner way than other alternatives.

------
jankotek
Delphi 1 on Win 3.11 and 4MB RAM. Long long time ago.

~~~
neuro
Customer VCL development too, how cool was that.

------
xinyiman
I learned object pascal (Delphi) in school in high school (now 18 years ago)
and it was love at first sight. Coming from ansi c and ansi c ++, the lack of
the garbage collector has never been a problem. But then the license costs
stopped me as well as the fact that I am a supporter of the open source world.
A few years later I discovered lazarus and the free pascal and I must say that
since then I have never abandoned them (now 12 years in which I program for
linux / windows and for a few years also for mac os and raspberry all for
free). If the delphi had lowered the licensing costs and made the product open
source in its time it would have killed the market, but it was not so.

------
skeletal88
One small language feature I liked about Delphi was class properties.

I used Delphi at my first job, while studying in the university, where we were
taught Java (and C and other languages), what I really disliked were Java's
getters and setters, which seemed like a clunky and pointless verbosity,
compared to the properties in Delphi.

Python has the @property decorator, I wish other languages had something like
that. Qt also has foo() and setFoo(), instead of getFoo(), which makes sense,
and reduces verbosity and visual clutter.

~~~
kwertzzz
This is exactly what I like too about Delpi (and Pascal if I remember
correctly) compared to C++ and Java. Julia, which I use now, has a similar
feature but properties are less extensively used there (except for
interoperability with Python). But it is a great feature to reduce the clutter
in your code.

------
vbezhenar
On my current work the main enterprise system client is written with Delphi
and still in active use. I worked for years to gradually replace it with web
system with Java, but there's still a lot to do. While I hate it with passion,
because it was written by a few generations of developers with very poor
practices, the mere fact that it exists and works is a testament to Delphi
former glory.

Another component is Oracle 9i running on Itanium HPUX. At least it works
fine.

------
ubermonkey
Borland's Turbo products were my entre into PC programming in the last 80s.
It's amazing, but not unusual, how quickly they descended into utter
irrelevance.

------
edgarvm
Borland made a lot of mistakes with Delphi, but the best part of delphi was
VCL was shipped with the source, it was a great introduction for the Win32 API
world.

------
jshowa3
The language that everyone knows and now no one uses.

~~~
jtth
quite a few people use it
[https://jonlennartaasenden.wordpress.com/2020/01/20/turkey-s...](https://jonlennartaasenden.wordpress.com/2020/01/20/turkey-
secures-delphi-access/)

~~~
jshowa3
Compared to the hundreds of millions using languages like python, C#,
Javascript etc.?

It's mostly a dead language. Didn't even hit the 2019 developer survey on
stack overflow. My university never used it and no company I've ever been in
has used it and I've been with 4 already.

------
Dimitry2018
Here are a couple of links with some awesome Delphi applications
[https://beyondvelocity.blog/2019/05/19/awesome-
applications-...](https://beyondvelocity.blog/2019/05/19/awesome-applications-
built-in-delphi/)

There many lists like these with many new apps popping up.

~~~
Dimitry2018
I find the fact that there r quite a few games very interesting. I guess,
there maybe a decent set of libraries for 2D and 3D graphics.

------
notriskfree
Delphi is great; just ensure you always stay subscribed. Their tech support
team regard properly managing their own strict license system as 'a courtesy'
and will prevent you from installing the licensed software that you purchased.
For that reason alone; I am out.

~~~
imagine99
> will prevent you from installing the licensed software that you purchased

Could you elaborate on that? I'm actually interested in procuring Delphi
commercially after getting to know the free Community edition recently and I'd
like to avoid any licensing pitfalls if possible. I can't really imagine how
they would stop you from installing a properly licensed and purchased software
but if they do, I'd be curious to know how to avoid running into that
situation. Thanks.

~~~
wila
You have a max. number of times you can install and after that you can only
get it re-activated by buying a new version..

This was a hot topic at their forums. Sorry, can't locate that now, but here
is a post of somebody who bumped into this:

[https://community.idera.com/developer-tools/general-
developm...](https://community.idera.com/developer-tools/general-
development/f/installation-issues-23/70832/have-some-of-you-ever-experienced-
a-refusal-from-embarcadero-support-to-allow-you-to-register-for-the-1st-time-
a-legit-licence-of-c-builder-xe4)

It's pretty customer hostile if you ask me.

~~~
nottorp
The fuck ?!?

------
praptak
The GUI builder was great, the build times were great, the debugger was great.

What was not great was Pascal, especially their version of it. It didn't even
have a published formal grammar (as of Delphi 5), as I found out when trying
to write some simple tooling for our codebase.

------
wenc
Interesting fact about the name: if you wanted to talk to Oracle, you needed
to go to Delphi.

------
peter_d_sherman
Excerpt:

"I started my coding career using a Turbo Pascal clone for the Commodore
Amiga, something called High-Speed Pascal, published by UK based company Hi-
Soft."

 _It would be interesting if an open-source version of this Amiga Turbo Pascal
clone - was available somewhere..._

~~~
rob74
Here's an overview of Pascal implementations for Amiga:
[http://fpcamigawiki.alb42.de/index.php?title=Workshop:Amiga,...](http://fpcamigawiki.alb42.de/index.php?title=Workshop:Amiga,_Pascal,_graphics.library_and_timer.device#HighSpeed_Pascal)
(however I think when they wrote "development seized", they actually meant
"ceased" ;) )

~~~
peter_d_sherman
Interesting link, much obliged!

------
edwinyzh
Congrats! My new software ([https://DocxManager.com](https://DocxManager.com)
\- site builder and document manager) is built with Delphi :)

------
altmind
For those missing Delphi, have you considered VS/C#/Winforms? I gonna tell you
than its binaries as portable as Delphi/Kylix(e.g. major platforms covered).

The language is much less annoying (oh how i hated Type and Var sections in
the times). The gui programming style can be similar or can be modernized. The
designer and component library is vastly improved. Third party components are
cheap compared to today's "cloud" prices. There are libs for everything. Its
free. Can be compiled to native binaries(not sure this will leave
'experimental'). Feels like a direct replacement to me.

~~~
pjmlp
Yes, that is my daily driver nowadays, however .NET AOT experience still
misses a bit compared with Delphi.

And Delphi is still around, no need to talk as if it was dead.

In Germany, it has a regular section on the .NET developers magazine and an
yearly conference.

~~~
nottorp
Does anyone do something non legacy in it?

Their pricing is a bit of a barrier to entry for new apps now.

~~~
pjmlp
Their pricing is quite competitive for companies that buy Oracle, SAP, DB2,
Qt, SQL Server, MSDN Enterprise.... kind of licenses.

That was Borland's mistake with their Inprise change, to abandon grassroots
developers and focus on this kind of companies.

This was last year's conference, [https://entwickler-konferenz.de/program-
en/](https://entwickler-konferenz.de/program-en/)

Anyone using this hardware, is running Delphi on their network.

[https://www.lab-services.nl/en/home](https://www.lab-services.nl/en/home)

~~~
nottorp
Yes, that's my point. They don't have anything for the small guy any more.

Basically losing the entire market where devs are allowed to choose their
platform, because they won't be aware of it.

I suppose wining and dining the executives puts food on the table too.

------
zerr
Lets also don't forget C++Builder :)

~~~
jacquesm
That was my tool of choice for _years_ and I still think that if someone
manages to duplicate that experience for the web that they'll make bank.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Borland once did a version of Delphi for the web, it compiled to PHP and was a
bit of a turd.

------
tvnfo
wow Delphi still around ^_^ Congrats!

------
Yuioup
OK,

At the time of the Delphi 8 release I went to a Delphi conference to get to
know the community better. This was 2003 or so? I was evaluating whether or
not to get more licenses for our company so we could put extra effort into
developing Delphi for .NET.

Let's just say that I found the people there to be rude and insulting. Not
just the people at the conference there but also by some of Borland staff
there as well. A joke was played on me which I won't get into here but I
didn't - and don't - appreciate being bullied.

Let's just say that the next day I abandoned Delphi and moved our entire
company to Visual Studio and never looked back.

~~~
imagine99
No offense, but that'd be like if you stopped eating your favourite vegetables
because you once met an offensive vegan :-)

Why would you move your ENTIRE company to a different language/development
system because someone was rude at a conference?

FWIW I felt out of place at conferences before, many are just an exercise in
peacocking and showing off (and still, I have learnt some interesting things
from some incredibly irritating people in my time). But I would never change
something that I like and that works for me because other people that just so
happen to use it too, are rude.

I've met arrogant and frankly insulting people at both Linux and Microsoft
events, for example (Linux famously has people who can be wonderfully
insulting on mailing lists and dare I say often deservedly so) but it would
never occur to me to switch my entire company to, say, Windows Server, because
Linus (heaven forbid) said something rude to me :-)

I can't even actually rule out that I might have behaved in a way that might
have been interpreted as rude at conferences myself, especially after several
days of travel, talks and general exhaustion. So I'd actually be curious to
hear how you felt you were insulted or bullied or made a joke of so that I
might keep an eye out for such behaviour myself.

FWIW, you may find that Borland is no longer around or involved with Delphi
(and hasn't been for a decade now, I think), so the people might be different,
too. I've certainly found Delphi worth a second look recently and hope the
forums and communities of old have been or will be revived in some way.

~~~
robocat
> so the [company] might be different, too

I had an acquaintance who bought the most recent Delphi release (he’s a long
term customer), but had some troubles so he installed the free community
edition as a stop gap solution. They phoned him and bolloxed him and
_demanded_ he buy another copy, extremely rudely and extremely forcefully
(almost as if the person calling had KPI’s for upsells).

Unless I had a burning reason to use Delphi, I would avoid it, since I don’t
like dealing with stupid businesses if I can avoid it... Don’t burn your loyal
customers...

~~~
SatNine20One
In my experience the company treat individual customers with something akin to
contempt.

