alcalde

Seriously, there's just random angry blog posts. You can't get the equivalent of a 300 page book teaching you programming concepts from the @*#& on the Internet.

Of course, now that all the software is free.

Nim's designer is too enamored with Delphi and has chosen to borrow many of Delphi's bad ideas for nostalgic reasons. This adds more ambiguities, more Perl-like symbol use, more reliance on an intelligent IDE, etc. Python is about the importance of simplicity and readability. I don't see Python devs abandoning Python for Nim any time soon. The ones who would have been tempted by Nim have already been tempted away by Go.

I get this same thing from the Delphi users forum, where the diehards strain to convince themselves that Delphi has "three million users" and "is about as popular as Python". They insist that there's no reason Stack Overflow questions should be correlated with real-world usage. One suggested, seriously, that perhaps Delphi is just so easy to use that users don't need to ask questions. This excuse has been adopted to explain a lack of commercially published books ("maybe everything to say about Delphi has already been said") and there was even an attempt to explain away job posting data. In that case it was theorized that Delphi jobs are filled as soon as they're posted while Java jobs go unfilled for months so when you see thousands of Java jobs on Dice but no Delphi jobs that actually means there's a huge Delphi jobs market and no one's actually using Java. :-(

Never underestimate how far users of "sunset technologies" will go to convince themselves that their skill set is outdated. Heck, Embarcadero's C++ product manager insists that "customers tell him" that Delphi (Pascal!) is "five times more productive than Python" and he actually believes this too. The Delphi product manager, meanwhile, told me he sincerely believes that Delphi has had more of an impact on the business world than Python ever has. Meanwhile, the former VP of Developer Relations once polled the first 500 people to upgrade to their newest release of Delphi, crunched the data, and concluded that users really love Delphi (of course, the many who felt the upgrade was light on features and high on price and chose not to upgrade weren't reflected in the data).

It makes me want to pull my hair out.

Want to buy Delphi today from EMBT? At minimum you'll need Delphi Professional at over $1000. Want to access something other than SQLite via their database system? Well, to avoid upgrading to the $2000 price point you'll need the $500 Client/Server add-on that also brings things like (awful) JSON support. Note you're out of luck if you want things like HTML parsing, which still isn't in the standard library. You have to get a subscription now to get ANY bug fix updates (!!!), so that's several hundred more dollars. Now you're looking at an entry fee of about $2,147 for one (niche) language which hasn't seen a commercially published book since 2005 (seriously). And it doesn't end there. There's only a crippleware bundle for profiling (no 64bit support), so if you want a top, 64bit profiler that's another pricey $600 or $800 from a third party. There's no documentation generation support, so you're going to need to spend $200-$300 for that from another third party (I've seen $300 options that can't output PDF). HTML parsing? $60. There's an open source mega-framework that has support for ORM and web, but if you don't use that you're again looking at three-digit costs for each. Want matrices and math, statistics or data mining? That's about another $500 apiece with source code. There's no official testing framework and the one major open source one died so now there are many somewhat-compatible options you're going to have to hunt through on SourceForge. Oh, version control? Only full support for Subversion. There's finally some GIT support, but only local - you can't push to github or another central server with it. The IDE is buggy and you can't even redefine all of the keys (!!!!!!!!!! - yes the only IDE on earth that won't let you remap keystrokes) so you need more third party plugins that offer UI fixes, unofficial bug fixes and some remapping support.

It goes on and on. When I considered it for a project the cost came out to almost $5000! Instead we went full open source (including JetBrains' open source version of PyCharm) and got lots of functionality one couldn't find at any price on the Delphi platform - which incidentally is, just now in 2015, beginning to set up package management. Unfortunately it will be tightly controlled by Embarcadero and they've issued all sorts of warnings about not approving code that replaces functionality in Delphi (in short, they're afraid of competition). The community has no control over the language or the product and the diehards that are left treat it like a religion. They have something called "MVPs" who actually sign a contract to never disparage the language or Embarcdero! In exchange for selling their integrity they get free copies of the product. Completely coincidentally, they'll tell you that the product isn't overpriced. They'll also tell you it's used all over but no one talks about it because "it's their secret weapon". Delphi's product manager told me that he fully believes that "Delphi has had a greater impact on the business world than Python ever has". You not only have to pay all that money, you have to deal with the Scientology of programming languages. :-(

So no, you pay far more than for IntelliJ, you have no control over the product, you have no working roadmap, you don't even have RELEASE DATES for new versions. It's a whole other world over there than what the rest of us are used to.

JetBrains sells $99 IDEs like in the Turbo Pascal days. The current producer of Borland's Delphi, Embarcadero, sell the product for a minimum of $1000 plus a subscription is now required to get ANY bug fixes at all! Accessing a client/server database is a $500 add-on (or upgrade to the $2000 package), etc. Delphi Professional + c/s add-on plus subscription runs about $2147 the last time I checked!

Who in 2015 pays $2,147 to be able to develop software? Note that you'll need to spend even more to target mobile and there's no Linux solution yet either.

Delphi users refuse to accept it (or that mobile or web are here to stay, or that there are better VCS systems than subversion, which is the only VCS that Delphi's IDE fully supports) but the days of the expensive, proprietary IDE are indeed dead. MS releasing a free VS Community Edition was just the final nail in the coffin.