Delphi's 25th Birthday

https://community.idera.com/developer-tools/b/blog/posts/25-years-of-excellence

by mustafabisic1 • 6 years ago

182 194 6 years ago

community.idera.com

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• 6 years ago

Here's an overview of Pascal implementations for Amiga: http://fpcamigawiki.alb42.de/index.php?title=Workshop:Amiga,... (however I think when they wrote "development seized", they actually meant "ceased" ;) )

peter_d_sherman2• 6 years ago

Interesting link, much obliged!

mickeyp• 6 years ago

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.

nottorp10• 6 years ago

My first paid programming job was Delphi. Worked with 1, 2, 4 and 6 I think. Then it went extremely enterprise. And I'm saying that even though it was used for an accounting application.

RIP. You were great once.

gfody• 6 years ago

I had the same experience and I often wonder about the tendency to "go enterprise" - it seems more like sabotage than idiocy after enough coffee. Probably just the consequence of excessive profiteering /shrug.

altmind2• 6 years ago

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...

Xelbair• 6 years ago

Sadly i have to use that piece of shit called firebird.

It has all the downsides of service based DB without all the advantages of file based DB.

And the documentation is way below average, backwards compatibility is a joke.

Not to mention the 3rd party software had to design their own(horribly bad) way to handle geometry in firebird... and they keep transactions open forever - and bloody firebird prior to 2.5 had no way to drop the dead connections.

weavie3• 6 years ago

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...

wolfgke• 6 years ago

Firebird is still actively developed as open source software:

http://firebirdsql.org/

wdb3• 6 years ago

I always thought NexusDB was the database to use in Delphi days?

tonyedgecombe2• 6 years ago

My impression was they had already lost the race before they went down the enterprise route. If anything it was their general failure in the market that pushed them down that route.

astrodust• 6 years ago

They were under pressure from Microsoft (Visual Studio, FoxPro, Access and others) as well as from the web which was disrupting everything at the same time.

conradfr• 6 years ago

I organized the Borland developer conference in my country as a marketing intern in 2004 and it was still quite popular, but it's true the web was just around the corner to eat desktop apps.

I also remember a coworker had been approached by MS to work on the DotNet marketing campaign and he declined, as it was seen as kind of a failure with a very uncertain future. Hindsight is 20/20.

edit: personally I have found memories of Delphi3.

justin66• 6 years ago

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.

It's worth noting that Kylix's failure to take off had a lot more to do with Borland's variously stupid, obnoxious and immoral business decisions than it had to do with the upheaval in the Linux desktop world. It was a strong enough concept for a product, and the base technology was implemented well enough, that all they had to do was not screw it up... and guess what they did?

All these years later I remember saying "fuck it" when Borland decided to wrap up some important bug fixes into the (full price) upgrade for Kylix, rather than just giving them to existing users. The smug uselessness of the one or two Borland employees who liaised with the community online has kind of stuck in my memory as well. The technology deserved to survive but the company sure didn't.

tluyben2• 6 years ago

In the bubble they definitely thought they could not die; they were shooting up people who were aware of Linux made a lot of money from their shares at that time (if they sold in time as they never recovered). The CEO at the time acted like it would last forever and I guess he took the employees with him on a smugness ride. Such a shame as they could've gotten far as you say.

martin_a2• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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_a2• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

In case you still want to work with it : https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

pjmlp13• 6 years ago

Actually, if one wants to try out Delphi,

https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter

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

chungy• 6 years ago

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.

frenchy• 6 years ago

I went there and got a registration form. I field some garbage data in the first few fields and then the form just went bonkers.

haunter3• 6 years ago

What's the difference between this and https://www.getlazarus.org/?

Ok I kinda find out.

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ is made by the Free Pascal team, that's the "official" version. It has precompiled binaries to download https://www.lazarus-ide.org/index.php?page=about

https://www.getlazarus.org/ is a different version (but not sure by how much), using download scripts https://www.getlazarus.org/about/

fortunajs• 6 years ago

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 ;-)

pjmlp13• 6 years ago

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.

zerr7• 6 years ago

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 :)

altmind2• 6 years ago

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.

pjmlp13• 6 years ago

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.

nottorp10• 6 years ago

Does anyone do something non legacy in it?

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

nsomaru• 6 years ago

What’s a good tutorial for getting started building a cross platform Linux/OSX/Windows app using this stack?

This coming from a python guy who is looking to build a native admin area for a web product.

fmxexpress• 6 years ago

This template project has a REST back end (sounds like you already have that) and demos connecting to it from native clients and from AngularJS. You don't have to do anything special to hit Windows/OSX/Linux with it. The one project will compile to all 3.

https://community.embarcadero.com/article/16560-deep-dive-ho...

pjmlp13• 6 years ago

Happy Birthday Delphi!

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

oneweekwonder• 6 years ago

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.

pjmlp13• 6 years ago

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.

ZoomZoomZoom• 6 years ago

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.

moomin• 6 years ago

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.)

TsomArp3• 6 years ago

Never had the problems you mention till Delphi 7.

thu21114• 6 years ago

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.

davidhbolton2• 6 years ago

I always found the even versions (D4,D6) buggy while D5 and D7 were very reliable.

D4 had bugs in its COM code. In 2000 I worked at a Dotcom (homedirectory.com) and we used a D4 COM search component running in SQL Server 6.5. It used to crash when the CPU load went above 5%. I guessed it was D4, recompiled under D5 and that fixed it.

Microsoft as part of its settlement to Borland over the employee poaching (including AH) provided technical info that let D5 generate reliable COM code.

robocat3• 6 years ago

The IDE was still a 32bit app and was seriously unreliable and insanely slow last I looked (2017 or so, the compiler finally got 64bit support though!).

jankotek• 6 years ago

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

neuro• 6 years ago

Customer VCL development too, how cool was that.

m0zg2• 6 years ago

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).

tenant2• 6 years ago

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

lmz• 6 years ago

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

tibbydudeza• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

AnimalMuppet2• 6 years ago

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.

mhd3• 6 years ago

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.

TsomArp3• 6 years ago

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.

mhd3• 6 years ago

I meant that software for mid-sized companies isn't end-user programming, but not enterprise development either and that Delphi was pretty great for that. Often single developer, often embedded database.

Didn't want to imply that Delphi wasn't/wouldn't be great for the other ends of the spectrum, too.

sysrpl3• 6 years ago

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

jawngee• 6 years ago

I wrote two MIDI sequencers in Delphi and a couple of audio editors.

A lot of audio software and VST plugins, in the early days, was done in Delphi.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130121065235/http://www.sonics...

gyulai6• 6 years ago

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).

dvdhsu• 6 years ago

Hi there! I’m working on Retool (https://retool.com), which is “Delphi in the cloud”. The goal, as you said, is to make it easier and faster to build “UI-heavy software”. If anybody has any comments or suggestions on how we could market something like this, please let me know! In david@. Thanks!

gyulai6• 6 years ago

Not sure exactly where your product lands in a continuum between where Delphi was in the late 90s and where Microsoft Access was in the late 90s with its ability to create forms on top of databases, or maybe Oracle Forms. Delphi was the more heavy-duty option for cases that involved a more substantial investment in coding-up actual logic.

Now when I think "substantial investment" and then look at your website, what comes to mind is "lock-in nightmare". Sorry, not trying to be cruel, just wanting to give you an honest opinion.

I mean: Picture a development team pouring real efforts into development work, then training end-users to use the final product. That represents a real investment. And that investment is then locked into a vendor, where it's unclear what will happen to that investment if the vendor should decide to change the pricing model or go out of business.

I guess the original Delphi did have that problem, but the world was just a different one in the late 90s. You bought your copy of Delphi on a CD with a perpetual license, and an organization that had lock-in to Windows NT software would see it as a perfectly viable path, to keep those Windows NT systems running for the next 20 years to recoup any investment in software. Plus Microsoft was actually pretty good (and continues to be good) at establishing backwards-compatibility.

vintagedave10• 6 years ago

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.

gyulai6• 6 years ago

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

tsss• 6 years ago

I really wouldn't call it modern, unless you consider C++ modern.

chrisseaton• 6 years ago

has modern language features

What kind of modern language features has it gained?

zerr7• 6 years ago

Do you plan to open source it and adopt e.g. Qt-like business model? e.g. charge for service, not tools (except probably some enterprise chart or reporting components).

danmg• 6 years ago

Wasn't this the idea behind WinForms and VS.NET? I even think some of the original Delphi people worked on it.

bartels_media• 6 years ago

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

Yuioup2• 6 years ago

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.

imagine995• 6 years ago

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.

Yuioup2• 6 years ago

OK I guess I did feel a bit butt hurt, but I was at that conference to genuinely get information about the latest features (MIDAS, ASP.NET integration, etc...) and my questions fell on deaf ears. It was being ignored and pranked upon combined with a general sense of directionlessness that turned me off of Delphi.

robocat3• 6 years ago

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...

pritambarhate• 6 years ago

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.

pjmlp13• 6 years ago

Yes they do.

C, C++, Ada, Pascal, Basic, Oberon compilers for embedded market, in many cases, certificed compilers.

Commercial UNIX, mainframe and Windows compilers (VS Community doesn't cover everything) are still a separate product.

Sony, Nintendo, MS SDKs for their game consoles.

HPC compilers, yeah you can try with clang and gcc, but if you are doing top research, then IBM, Intel, CodePlay, PGI compilers is what you want to be using on that hardware, and they cost pennies versus the total hardware cost.

And even in what concerns Apple, I would consider that XCode is somehow included in Apple^s hardware price.

AnimalMuppet2• 6 years ago

I think the standard approach is to not add extra constraints.

Are you writing general purpose, portable code code? You'd rather not be locked in to a specific vendor's compiler.

Are you working in embedded systems? Your code is probably hardware-specific, at least to some degree. You probably aren't going to switch CPUs very often. You probably are never going to switch CPU families. You also probably are never going to upgrade the compiler, still less switch to a different vendor's compiler. So if you aren't going to do that anyway, you don't worry much about a one-vendor-only compiler or language.

I think it's a similar story in HPC. You're constrained by your hardware. You get the best compiler for that setup. That means it's hard to change compilers? It's even harder to change your hardware, so you didn't add much of a constraint.

thu21114• 6 years ago

.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.

exikyut2• 6 years ago

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

dvh• 6 years ago

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.

dvfjsdhgfv• 6 years ago

They figured it out but only recently, now the race is over.

bencoder• 6 years ago

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

vintagedave10• 6 years ago

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

tvnfo• 6 years ago

wow Delphi still around ^_^ Congrats!

sysrpl3• 6 years ago

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/

imagine995• 6 years ago

What are the advantages / pros of this vs. the free Delphi Community Edition? Seriously asking, as I've been out of the "Delphi sphere" too long and not really familiar with the latest developments but looking to get back into it.

sysrpl3• 6 years ago

The advantages? The compile works on must every CPU and platform, including Windows, Mac, Linux, Raspberry Pi, Gameboy Advanced, Amiga, and on and on.

Also it's open source, so when you are writing code you can actually navigate to the underlying sources and step into everything with the debugger if you want.

Finally, it comes with library support for so much more than Delphi, including Google APIs, FreeType, Cairo, Fuse, and so on.

Oh and it can also build to Java byte code and run in a Java JVM, also to Android.

Did I mention it's free and open source under active development?

haunter3• 6 years ago

What's the difference between this and https://www.lazarus-ide.org/?

exikyut2• 6 years ago

(Same thing. Not sure why there's two websites.)

bmn__2• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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

imagine995• 6 years ago

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 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.

stevekemp• 6 years ago

For the future "interest was piqued" would be better than "peaked" :)

vintagedave10• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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

wdb3• 6 years ago

Marco, DavidI, DrBob42, Cary Jensen, Nick Hodges, Treehouse Guy, Ray Konopka all a blast from the past :)

alexeiz• 6 years ago

I'm seriously considering putting in a purchase request for the Architect edition now...

Go ahead, make Embarcadero sales department happy. Delphi has not evolved substantially in years. They pretty much keep the product on life support, milking whatever they can from support contracts. I don't see a reason to invest your money and time in Delphi unless you have a legacy application to support.

notriskfree3• 6 years ago

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.

imagine995• 6 years ago

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.

wila4• 6 years ago

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...

It's pretty customer hostile if you ask me.

SatNine20One2• 6 years ago

Firstly: I liked Delphi a lot; learned it a long time ago.

Straight risk avoidance advice:- You need to install the Delphi software on a completely dedicated system that you never plan to reset; and image back it up; and hopefully that will work. And install the software on a Virtual Machine and back that up. And/Or always renew the subscription if the new features make any sense to you or not. Do these things and you will be Ok.

My experience was:

I am programming as a hobby; even so - I don't like to commit a huge amount of my personal evening and weekend time to software with a toy license that restricts what I can do with it.

In 2017; Delphi started to look good again; I got the starter edition; really liked it; found it useful; thought why not support the developers; and upgraded to the commercial version at 10.1; also purchased a number of really nice plugins; (used Delphi in my spare time project for a year or so); very happy with the results.

Stopped using it for a while; because my project was finished. I also messed around with Delphi on a couple of my systems while playing with mobile apps and Macs; found it much less useful there.

My main focus is windows desktop not mobile; I was playing around with new pre-release versions of Windows; I had to reset those systems when they got out of hand.

I ended up unable to reinstall 10.2 (my third party components need that.) So I contacted support; and was knocked back; with a cold email.

I guess the licensing methodology may be legal (not a lawyer); but it does not seem fair or reasonable to me.

I have written a lot of Delphi in projects I can not rebuild; I own several third party components that are now useless to me. The current version is I think 10.3; I was subscribed up until 10.2.

Other feedback

I think Delphi is good for Windows desktop programming; especially for GUIs that connect to data bases; nothing like as exceptional for Mac or Mobile. With respect to those databases you used to need the Enterprise version to use MySQL etc; as the lower license agreement did forbid the use of database services; only allowing local data.

I ended up spending many enjoyable hours learning or re-remembering how the database connections worked in Delphi; and figuring out how my third party components all worked; then enjoyed gluing them all together in my programs.

Where I am now: I could purchase the latest Delphi and update all my components; for no real benefit to my project; or I can learn to like .NET core and get translating. The third party components I used; are also available for .NET; and there are thousands of open source packages for .NET as well. Not so sure about the GUI.

How do they stop you?:

To be completely clear; because that company likes to be fuzzy about it; I have a valid license; serial number; invoice; and online account (which I really need to delete); I am blocked because I re-installed the software too many times. Where too many; was not very many; and was not even concurrent.

All the best with your project.

dana3212• 6 years ago

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

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

nottorp10• 6 years ago

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.

dana3212• 6 years ago

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

zerr7• 6 years ago

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

pjmlp13• 6 years ago

Yes, still unbeaten in what concerns C++ RAD development.

For a short while C++/CX seemed to be finally it, but C++/Winrt has regressed the experience.

zerr7• 6 years ago

And neither of those (cx/winrt) produced standalone native executables.

jacquesm• 6 years ago

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.

tonyedgecombe2• 6 years ago

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

zerr7• 6 years ago

I'd say ASP.NET Web Forms was the closest so far.

sharken2• 6 years ago

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.

weavie3• 6 years ago

I've probably spent a similar amount of time tracking down memory leaks in C# as I have with Delphi. Garbage collector or not - desktop gui app, with lots of event handlers can cause things to hold on to memory a lot longer than they should. Having a garbage collector in these cases just seems to give a false sense of security.

nottorp10• 6 years ago

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.

sharken2• 6 years ago

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.

robocat3• 6 years ago

4. Irrelevant features: every release needed some cool sounding feature, that inevitably turned out to be no use.

1. No Garbage Collector

I somewhat disagree. Strings are refcounted which removes 90% of the potential pain. Interfaces could be used to ensure objects were freed at end of function scope. Full GC would have ruined Delphi IMHO (if you wanted GC you used VB, or Java which had downsides related to it’s GC. Delphi Apps worked great on low resource machines).

praptak• 6 years ago

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.

xinyiman• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

magicalhippo2• 6 years ago

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.

chadcmulligan3• 6 years ago

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?

magicalhippo2• 6 years ago

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.

stockerta• 6 years ago

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.

mobilio2• 6 years ago

I start with TP 5.0 or 5.5.

pjmlp13• 6 years ago

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.

schnable• 6 years ago

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.

wenc• 6 years ago

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

ubermonkey• 6 years ago

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.

jshowa32• 6 years ago

The language that everyone knows and now no one uses.

jtth• 6 years ago

quite a few people use it https://jonlennartaasenden.wordpress.com/2020/01/20/turkey-s...

jshowa32• 6 years ago

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.

Dimitry20182• 6 years ago

Here are a couple of links with some awesome Delphi applications https://beyondvelocity.blog/2019/05/19/awesome-applications-...

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

Dimitry20182• 6 years ago

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.

wdb3• 6 years ago

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...

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

vbezhenar• 6 years ago

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.

edgarvm• 6 years ago

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.

ablekh• 6 years ago

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.

edwinyzh• 6 years ago

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

davidhbolton2• 6 years ago

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.

Delphi's 25th Birthday

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