Is Delphi Dead or Dying?
Sunday March 27, 2005
FORUM :: "It's been hard finding resources on delphi for me..I mean, I can stand on any corner and get helpl on VB, but im getting discouraged with delphi and thinking about just going to VB.."
What do you think? Is Delphi dying?
I would say NO!
What do you think? Is Delphi dying?
I would say NO!
Comments
I would say YES! Delphi sucks. Pascal ruled in the 80’s and early 90’s but Delphi NEVER did.
Yes, Delphi is dead. I have 10 years commercial experience with Delphi and all my regular clients have now shifted to C#.
It is sad to see how Delphi has been mistreated by Borland but at this stage Delphi programmers either learn a different language or find another occupation. This is a pity because Delphi still has plenty to offer.
Forums have become very quiet. New libraries are no longer released. Commercial libraries are all but discontinued. Open source libraries stopped maintaining API’s for Delphi and if you wish to use a modern graphics engine for Delphi you are simply out of luck.
I think some TMS components are there having cool graphics in Delphi, I can understand why clients switching to C#, but Delphi is not dead, it is still better than many other programming languages, but its not in main frame.
For some reason inprise stoped some product’s development(since the Kylix 3 controversy), they focused only in the IDE development and some bug fixing, the personal editions were something nice that tryed to gain more users and later Codegear tried to regain the new developers releasing the turbo editions (the diference between turbo and personal is the license, a really atractive license) but it was too late, they missed like 5 years of market presence, the documentation is still too awfull even in the RAD 2007(too little in important things and excesive in other less important issues, it was like they passed the doc-o-matic and copied and pasted lots of blah blah blah pages from the msdn (and that must explain why if you type F1 with a data-type selected you get the VB definition instead the C++ or delphi definitions by default)), the fact that the IDE is written with .NET (which is still buggy) means that they don’t believe in their own VCL and won’t get any reward developing it, it’s like they didn’t get enough incoming from their products and just gived up, they are responsable for delphi developers becoming lone wolves (like the ASM, FORTRAN, COBOL or RPG developers), the forums and help sites are becoming like an underworld, out of the sight of the light like the China delphi users site.
Not everything was bad, Delphi’s Together integration and automatic source code doc generation tools were the best thing in many years easing the work a lot but no one seemed to care about it.
If Embarcadero wants to get the most of delphi it should start working with the VCL stability and portability (and i hope they don’t rely too much with .NET since mono it’s only partially portable with the ms .NET), right now the cross-plataform development had grown enough with projects like wxWidgets and the TwinForms (www.twinforms.com/wxvcl.htm).
I still believe in Delphi and VCL since i can make cleaner and faster applications with a longer lifecycle and port it at least partially to lazarus.
I still like Delphi (mainly Delphi 7) among other version of Delphi itself, furthermore among any other programming language. Why ? I’ve used turbo pascal many years ago. And loved it’s structured model and the language itself. And it’s go beyond that with Delphi. But the coding is still the same. How you define a type, variable, constants (programming method), etc, thats why I still like Delphi. Sometimes when I need some addition ability from currently available components (whether standard or 3rd party), I’m adding it myself (If I could, ha..ha..ha…). How fast could you create a simple application that’s only says “Hello World” with any other PL ?
Delphi may be dead, but it’s legacy lives on in Free Pascal and even more so in the Lazarus Project. These guys are doing what Borland never succeeded in doing taking Delphi cross platform.
I don’t know nothing that is forever… But Delphi is not dead… If you want learn a language that will not die fast, learn C… But, please, do not talk about C#, Java or VB… How can you use a language that need a runtime or a virtual machine to run? Delphi is fast, C is fast, Assembly is fast… Java, C#, VB is very slow… If you cannot found resources for Delphi, you need to look better… You will find many resources…
Alex.’.
Yes, finding new components is not as easy as VB or .NET. But VB or C# is way behind from the robust feature of DELPHI. DELPHI is not dead. Yes, we have to write compos for ourselves which takes a lot of time but after that when the package is ready then that package is far more better than VB or like.
Delphi isn’t really “dying” - the new versions keep coming out and the product keeps improving. The problem is that it’s priced itself out of its logical target market. The Enterprise version is selling for something like $2400, single user, and there’s no academic pricing anymore either. The programmers most likely to benefit from Delphi are small-time niche developers, college students, and shareware authors who probably charge less than $40 for a typical program license. Big IT shops and Fortune 500 companies haven’t adopted Delphi because it isn’t a Microsoft product - and that’s really the only reason. I doubt it has anything whatsoever to do with a “lack of 3rd-party components” (something I’ve never really run into personally). Meanwhile, the “Turbo” versions help, but what they really need are better database connectivity options at the low end, at least if they’re going to continue to try and compete with Visual Studio.
Dead or dying? I would not agree but if you compare Delphi 3, Delphi 7 and Delphi 2009 there is no (really) substantial difference. They have had great idea, they were leaders for some time but now (and in last couple years) they are not advancing. I can not see that anybody from Delphi team has an idea what is Delphi future. It is pity because it still has potential to be very valuable system for development but somebody has to sit and think about what is most appropriate.
I am not sure how long Embaracadero will keep it. I hope (and maybe it will be the best) that, if nothing else, Delphi will became Open Source. Look how Firefox rose from Netscape remains to be number two (and advancing).
Any way it would be good to hear somebody from Embaracadero about plans for Delphi.