I spent 13 years writing software in Delphi professionally. It's really more like 22 years of buggy, bit-rotting in-house developed software left behind in the dust as Delphi has pivoted is way forward over dead bodies. Not to mention 22 years of well-intentioned but delusional architectural decisions and numb-witted implementations stacked on top of a sinking foundation to check features. Every year they come up with revolutionary, proprietary and over-engineered solutions to the currently most popular problems; while consistently pretending like the crap they sold yesterday never happened. Delphi makes it easy to whip up a quick Windows GUI, and that's about it; hardly worth the insane amounts they've always insisted on charging. With a less greedy and marketing-driven approach, Delphi could have been great. The same could be said of many lost technologies.
Very sad. I was a Delphi developer for 14 years here.
Was very happy with Turbo Pascal 7 and later Delphi, it was perfect and still haven't found a manual as helpful as the one at their IDE. Then it died. Was probably with this .NET bloat and then getting completely out of touch with their developer-base.
Delphi built amazingly small executables and really good looking UI without much trouble for newbies, that you could escalate to highly complex software (I've even wrote a language compiler with Delphi). Even today, those smallish Delphi binaries built for Windows run surprisingly well under OSX and Linux through Wine. That's multi-platform right there.
There was no need for the bloat or crazy licensing prices that pushed away the small developers, which in turn killed the popularity of Delphi.
I'm a Java developer for 8 years now, it isn't perfect but sure is reachable for anyone and at least the code under a JVM will keep compiling without buying licenses.
