Rest In Peace Delphi
It’s not without sadness I see that what used to be my favorite language has taken a big dive in popularity recent years. Now Borland Delphi is only the 14th most popular programming language according to TIOBE Programming Community Index as per august 2007. That is five ranks lower than one year ago, and far from it’s golden days in the mid 1990’s.
Delphi was really a great language to work with. In the early days it was a strong, even leading power in the programming community. It gave us one of the first RAD environments, which sure as hell was more visual than Visual C++ and Visual Basic, its competitors at the time.
But the popularity decline didn’t come as a surprise. It started with Microsoft snatching Anders Hejlsberg, the compiler genius who created Delphi’s predecessor Turbo Pascal. Following that, the increasingly lower quality releases and the name changing mess. For some unintelligible reason Borland changed its name to Inprise, only to change it back a couple of years later, most likely due to an internal revolt. Slowly but steadily even the most devoted started to leave for other, obviously better, alternatives.
Last year Borland announced that they were selling all of its development tools, including Delphi. It long looked as if Delphi would be brought back under the name of Turbo Delphi, but the sale was canceled. Instead the development tools were spun off into a new company, owned by Borland. Since then Delphi 2007 for Win32 has been released, the best release in many many many years. They really did shape up, but I’m afraid it’s too late. The magic is gone and I have moved on.
Farewell my friend.
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Very sad indeed. There is an interesting opensource alternative: Lazarus. It’s really nice for doing things at home. However, it’s not ready for production application..
lol you prove that you are a shitty programmer just with this blog post
Sorry to say, but there is no more money anymore in producing IDEs and compilers. This market is dead, and has been for years, and so Borland went on to new challenges (and rightly so).
filip: I’ve heard of Lazarus but never took the time to play with it. Maybe some day…
foo (the first one): Yes, you are right. I’m not a very good programmer, but I am a great developer.
foo (the second one): That’s true, the money is shifting away from products towards services. We can thank the Open Source movement for that.
No, Hans-Eric, he money isn’t shifting towards services, the money is shifting towards other products. Nobody can make money anymore with IDEs, because they’re an open source commodity. That’s why Borland shifted towards delivering products to support the application lifecycle, and “implementation” is only one of several phases of the AL (and the least interesting one, at least on the product development side).
BTW: how do you want to be a great developer when you admit that you’re not a good programmer? Developers who don’t know their tools of the trade are doomed to fail.
Delphi is in good hands and has a bright future …
With the popularity of “Portable Applications” - Delphi is alive and kicking., and has gone opensource !!!. If you need proof look at the dates at SourceForge.com
The Delphi VCL is here
http://sourceforge.net/projects/php-vcl/
The band new PHP VCL is here
http://sourceforge.net/projects/php-vcl/
Every self respecting programmer know JEDI (JVCL / JCL)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/jcl
and lastly look at the dates of components at Torry.ru and DelphiPages.com
You do not need a lot of lousy programmers - you just need a few good ones., so just because a language/product is not popular does not immediately suggest there is something wrong with the product.
Look at the activity at
http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/
Perhaps Delphi was too good at what it did … if you look around you will find several opensource forks that work do justice to the programming language where Borland lost it’s way. Just like Linux comes in different flavours - Delphi is available in different flavours now.
I liked Delphi. Then Microsoft killed it off. Microsoft has plenty of hate for us all. Let’s hate them right back.
i loved Delphi, but for me it has been dead for a long time. PHP Delphi might be a good thing, but i dont see many PHP developers switching to Delphi. But maybe if they promote it right and sell it not for oldschool big price theyhave a shot. The language was always the problem with Delphi, nobody likes to learn another type of programming language. I remember how i didnt like the C-style of Java. PHP is C-base too, so …. they should drop pascal or also support C-style language.
[...] few months ago Alex Miller pointed me to this Delphi doom article (the site appears to be down at the moment), which reminded me to post about the topic. Here [...]
I’ve been testing 15 years in different software for programming and development nothing compares to borland product specially delphi and cbuilder.
Dont give up delphi.
Give links to free downloads for old delphi versions.
For the incoming new versions of delphi, let the market test the new product.
Adjust Speed, accessibility and simpleness on the design.
Let Schools do the test specially for the students and they will know whats the best to use.
GOD speed delphi with borland products will rise again.
I’ve been testing different softwares development and programming tools since 1993 up to now jan20 2008, all i can say that borland product is the best choice, although microsoft seems to be good but nothing compares the system programming development of borland product.
Compare the c++ builder again’s ms visual c++ and you will know the accessibility, simpleness and systematic flow of the design.
Now if you are a geek or not geek you will know the difference.
The only matter borland’s product end out dead because their product in win32 platform was less introduce in the market.
Update Borland products for more and well end up an excellent market in the coming years beginning at 2008.
Don’t give up borland (delphi, c++builder, intrabuilder, etc’s).
GOD SPEED.
Team [rocarobin@yahoo.com].
Let’s clear one thing up.
Sounds like you are gone, not delphi or modern pascal.
RIP to you. Repeat after me: RIP to you.
The only thing causing Delphi and Modern Pascal to die is the people that bash the toolsets, which is sadly the people who are using the toolsets. You’d think that MS Visual C users would be bashing it.. but no, it is actually the people using it who are bashing it. RIP to delphi users.
It’s your opinion. My opinion is that delphi and object pascal is far better readable for me than C-like languages. I will continue use delphi.
Thank you for your comment. I too think Object Pascal outweighs C and C++ when it comes to readability and productivity. That’s why its decline is so sad.
Yes it is true that delphi is more readable than c/c++ because of its english words like ( begin, end, var for variable and other readables
in c/c++ we know its twisted words.
I hope you get my point.
But when it comes to deep programming, i think delphi is to hard to develop, thats my opinion.
I think delphi is not dead, because I’ve notice a lot of delphi code’s still at run
eg: Total Commander was coded on delphi
and other more.
Do you think their is a good program like TC for windows explorations ? NOP, TC is the best.
The only thing that makes delphi dead because of the DELPHI company name DELPHI AUTOMOTIVE
lol
But of course the creator of delphi transfer to microsoft because of the offer of $20M.
We Just continue coding with delphi for fun or for help
Thanks for the info Hans-Eric.
