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.
Delphi's 25th Birthday
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Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday
#42wow Delphi still around ^_^ Congrats!
Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday
#43For 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.
Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday
#44What 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.
They figured it out but only recently, now the race is over.
Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday
#45What 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.
They used to give it away. I learnt to program from a free magazine cover-disk Delphi, and its excellent help system.
Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday
#46I 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.
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.
Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday
#47A 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.
Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday
#48For 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/
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.
Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday
#49Delphi 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 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.
Here are a few more: fl studio, convert x to dvd, homesite, spybot search and destroy, resource hacker, innosetup, and originally mysql workbench
Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday
#50I 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#…
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...
Firebird is still actively developed as open source software: