What Happened to "Borland Delphi"? What is CodeGear? What is Embarcadero?

Borland don’t exists anymore.. now it’s part of MicroFocus (and from CompuWare the Quality-Area, too) … perhaps we can expect a TurboCobol.net sometimes

I think it’s a shame that Borland has pretty much gone – rather like a brilliant comet that gradually breaks up and disappears. I always thought they made excellent tools (although I never quite got to grips with ObjectVision or TurboPascal for Windows — too many parentheses!).
Once PK left, it seems to me that they floundered about trying to decide what they could make money from instead of really concentrating on the developer market. The name change to (insipid) Inspire just diluted the potent Borland name and confused (or alienated) lots of people.

Dabbling with Office suites was largely a waste of time and money and out of their core area of expertise (although I bought Quattro Pro and used that for many years). They have missed so many opportunities by trying to re-invent themselves.

The whole IDE paradigm is largely due to Borland and TurboPascal – excellent product at an irresistable price point. Delphi was a revolutionay product when it was launched as it was priced well and it allowed you to do so much so quickly – and it hid the ugliness of programming in Windows! I just wish it was available for other platforms.

I certainly hope that Delphi lives on.

Sometimes i wish there was still Borland on the box. My experience with Embarcadero-support isn’t that good. I still believe (more than ever) in Delphi as a product.

Michael,

Check out Lazarus/FreePascal at http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org. It’s an Open Source project that has been around for quite a few years. It started before Kylix and is going even stronger now that Kylix is gone. It has its quirks and limitations but can be quite useful. It’s certainly worth a look.

Larry

Well this is definitely sad! I got into programming by reading Douglas Stivison’s “Introduction To Turbo Pascal” when I was still in high school. I was always a huge fan of Philippe Khan and the vision he had at the helm.
Yes, it was stupid of them to buy out dated Ashton Tate with its crappy DBase program when Paradox was waaay superior.
I feel they should’ve came out with Delphi for Mac and Linux at an earlier time. Kylix took so long to materialize and then it was dropped.
Anyhow, I don’t think there will ever be a company like the original Borland. If the Open Source movement had caught on much quicker — back then — and Linux and Mac was at the market level they enjoy now (but only 10 or 15 years then), I think they would’ve made a lot of noise with some great products.
But honestly, Microsoft also has a lot to do with Borland’s demise. They competed unfairly in the Office market and was able to give things away thanks to its Windows monopoly. Companies like Sun, Borland, Corel, WordPerfect, and Netscape because of those friggin peeps in Redmond. Now Google is taking it to them and its a whole different Open Source ball game.

It’s sad knowing that Delphi is gone. I been using delphi for 10 years, from delphi 3 to delphi 7.

I enjoy the rapid development that delphi offers.

I hope borland will try find a way to bring delphi back.

Quattro Pro is now part of Correl Office. It is a much better spreadsheet program than Excel, particularly if you are doing scientific analyses.

hi
why everyone sad here
delphi will stay live forever

Yes Delphi still is and will be… It’s the sequel Die Hard with Bruce Delphi against MS…

Google should buy Delphi, then it would give MS a run for its money as VisBasic can’t touch it.

I wish Delphi was always on.

Like Jave Eclipse , why Delphi don’t have limited version ( not 31 days trial version ) for those who interest in Delphi, or to those who is can learn in Delphi.

The version must be easy for installation , and no time limit, but just a message or water-mark in final product that will disapear once they have a right registration.

I think it another choice to emerge new developer.

Delphi Still rocks and still makes me loads of money with very little effort and very happy clients.

I really have to laugh at everyone who says delphi is dead and then use to slower and over-complex frameworks like Java and .NET which end up costing the client several times as much in development and support and break with every other release of windows. (The apps I wrote for clients on windows 98 still work fine on Windows 7)

I suggest any developer who going through the “.NET strategic move” rise above the FUD and start there own company, you and your new clients be a lot happier long-run.

Emabarcadero has been the worse coompany in Delphi’s History. After using Delphi since 1995 (Version 1), our company has now moved away from Delphi. Embarcadero’s Upgrade fees and maintenance fees are rediculous. Shame on them!

I see you can get Delphi XE Starter Edition for a very cheap price for hobbyists which I nowadays am. I currently use Delphi7 Professional. As far as I can see at the moment all my progs work reasonably (with a few tweeks) in Windows7. Any advice on whether to ‘move up’ or stay as I am?

Larry D. is absolutely correct. Lazarus, built on top of FreePascal, is an amazing project. And, since Larry wrote this in 2009, Lazarus has been making great strides. The whole program structure has been steadily improving, dialog boxes have been cleaned up, stability has been increasing, etc. My feeling is that a version 1.0 is not too far away (currently 0.9.31)!

Both Lazarus and FreePascal have a number of *major* advantages over Delphi:

- They are truly cross-platform; They work on a long list of processors and operating systems (Windows, Linux, Mac OSX, among others), and work with all major widget sets like Gtk, Qt, win32, etc.;

- They are both fully open source, using permissive licences, and written in FreePascal (meaning you can enhance the compiler, IDEs, etc. themselves in their own language, Object Pascal); the FreePascal and Lazarus projects themselves are, of course, also great showcases of their own potential, having been written in themselves.

- They are, and will always be, available at no charge;

- They are both being very actively developed as we speak; they are not one-man projects, many people are working on them.

- Compilation and linking speeds have dramatically improved.

I have largely moved away from Delphi now. I am using Lazarus (version 0.9.31) with FreePascal (version 2.5.1), and it’s awesome.

Check it out:

and

Heeb.

Meh, links didn’t work as expected.

Here they are again:

http://lazarus.freepascal.org

and

http://freepascal.org

Regards,

Heeb.

Hi – I was joining Pascal in 1982 with the Compass Pascal for CP / M and Poly Pascal for DOS was launched in 1984 by Anders Heilsberg. I came from Fortran, Basic from GE Mark III system, and Prime Computers InfoBasic. Ever since Turbo Pascal 3.0 I have followed the upgrading schedule up Delphi 2.01, which I still use to develop my applications, which has been 25 happy years in the making what ever I wantet. I have TurboPowers FlashFiler ver 1.07, Woll2Woll’s InfoPower 2.0, TeeChart 3.0, TGlobe 2.04 amd homegrown ReportTools. I bought Delphi3 and tested Delphi4, but I still prefer Delphi2.

My package (Business Manager – Capacity Accounting System) performs downloads from SaaS besed e-conomic an interface programmed in MS VS2008 Professional and C #. I think the D2 will keep the rest of my life. I am now 68 years old. Thanks To The Delphi Magazine and all the fine people of Delphi på Internet.

Does anyone know where I can get a copy of Delphi 7. I have Delphi 6 but am having compatibility troubles with Vista and have read that one can get Delphi 7 to work under Vista and Windows 7.

I love Delphi.
I got a bit sad that Borland sold Delphi.
My experience with Embarcadero is alright.

I have tried to program in other languages but they dont always make sense to me, I dont know why, but Delphi does.

I came from Clipper before I end-up programming in Delphi. Well I would say that Clipper is to DOS while Delphi is to Windows. Productivity wise nothing beats these two great development tools in its own domain. Now I’m learning C# and dotNet and get familiar with C++. They are not that hard to learn. But I am not as productive using it in serious development as compared to when I was just starting to learn Delphi.

Hi
Almost all of you are right, especially about how great Delphi is and how we miss Borland.
But listen, this is not the issue.
More and more companies are reluctant to have a Delphi app developed for their needs and are hesitant even in buying a full product developed in Delphi. Frankly, it is very hardtop find a good Delphi programmer nowadays.
We developers cannot control the trend. We know that Delphi is the best. We know that Delphi saves time and money, but this does not count. They want dot net, they want Silverlight and they want the cloud.
So we must understand the market is shifting. Take a look at my favorite component vendor Developer Express, shifting along with the market towards dot net (and they are absolutely right) leaving us, Delphi developers, wining behind.
Being right and professional is not the case. It is all about survival. We will keep using Delphi for as long as we could, but we need also to make decisions soon because, unless there will be a super miracle, which I doubt, there is not much time left for Delphi.
David

David is right. I consider myself a part time, Delphi programmer who has used Delphi 3, 4, 5 and now rad XE. In my work recently I have had to deal with some big C programs and productivity has been quite slow. Like many here, I cannot but say how good Delphi has been in the past but that’s the point, it ‘has been’. Even with the new Embarcadero I can get functional apps running in very quick time and it suits our ‘testware’ kind of environment. These are not applications for general sale, but are used by others in our organisation.

For my bit, I would say that programmers should heed David’s comments and go the way the world is going. I saw that less that 2% of programmers use Delphi and it is rapidly declining.
If you want to remain in programming – and a job for that matter, I would suggest moving on, or find a new career.

Phil UK

I liked the early products (i myself started with the CP/M version), i also think Borland is the one that basicly destroyed delphi by delaying and delaying and making a lot of weird choices (but hey, haven’t we all).

@PhilUK: I think it will be increasing once XE2 will be hitting the streets with multiplatform (funny detail; using FPC for the moment). Pricing of XE products will indeed be higher then the past delphi7 but then you also get a lot more….

Sorry but I think that Delphi is on his way down.Kids are used to new and more M$$ stuff than ever.Waiting for Delphi 64 bit and multipatty?? for what if you cant even get the new updates for components.So you have to rewrite your code again with new components and bugs.With new release every year.. sorry .I used Delphi from 1 to 2009 and I had it..with CrystallREports , RxLib, Turbopower, orpheus,Qreport, fastReport, Bde,MySQL,FireBird you name it.

A recent press release on the Embarcadero site indicates that Delphi sales have grown by 15% per year since they took it over in 2008. I also feel there is some renewed activity on the Delphi web sites after a definite slowing down some years back.

As a seller of completed programs nobody has ever asked me what language the programs were developed in. All they want is a working solution. Delphi still gives me the best route to achieve that. Perhaps for programmers selling programming services it is different. But hopefully that will change also.

Hopefully the final comment in this thread but..

I’m currently writing my first cross platform Windows/Apple Mac Program using the new XE2 version of delphi, and its looking great with the new firemonkey controls. Embacadero should get a lot of credit for pushing the bounds of this great program outside of the windows environment and making it a great tool to work with.

With regard to the job market I am so glad I work for myself and am not constrained by the idiocies of certain corporate IT policys.

Delphi will never die,
Don’t so sad, Delphi guys

Delphi is always in your heart,
although not borland anymore.
You still can use it cross platform
and even use the intuitive simple interface development in many ways.