Before that it was C++ for 10 years (and I mostly used Borland’s C++ products).

I played with both PowerBuilder and Clarion a bit. PB was full of problems. I worked at a place that used both PB and Delphi, and I think every marketing demo I saw them do with PB blew up at least once. Big corporations seemed to prefer it over Delphi for whatever reason.

Clarion looked like a really promising tool, but it just seemed to fade away. I really don’t know what happened to it.

Borland was founded on Turbo Pascal, which originally sold for $50. They didn’t offer any discount to resellers, who just bought it for $50 each and resold it at the same price, hoping customers would buy something else while they were there.

When Borland chucked all of their language tools into CodeGear years later and said, “We’re selling off our crown jewels so we can focus on a bunch of boat anchors!” a lot of us were totally mystified. Delphi was their cash-cow for so many years, and those funds were used to finance a bunch of nonsense that went nowhere, rather than enhancing Delphi itself.

Embarcadero eventually bought CodeGear and it looked like things would get better. But then they were bought by a private equity firm that was trying to create another Computer Associates type of mega-software corp. They laid off most of the core developers and built an outsourcing team to maintain the core stuff. Very little has been added to the core language since then, although the IDE has evolved. They seem to be buying up companies and adding their tech to the Delphi Enterprise Edition to justify raising its price.

But what they’ve been doing is adding all kinds of new crap at the edges while ignoring the “inner city”, which has sort of gone to crap. I mean, it’s still there, but it has hardly changed in 10 years. Meanwhile they keep raising their prices — 6% per year for people on maintenance plans, beyond the retail price of the products. And if you’re not on a maintenance plan, then upgrades are going to cost you an arm and a leg.

They have a TON of corporations using apps originally written in D4-D7 that are still in operation. Those companies keep their maintenance plans active “just in case”, but many of them do not even move their code to the latest verions if there’s no particular benefit that outweighs the risks — and it's becoming harder and harder to justify the upgrades.

More importantly, to your point, they COULD be using Delphi for NEW projects, but they choose not to. Mostly, they use Microsoft products. Or Linux-based stuff leveraging open-source tools — which tends to be for building web-based products.

They’ve got multiple Delphi licenses already, so I don’t understand why they refuse to use it.

I dropped my Delphi maintenance plan last year because I don’t seen much value in it. I’m not worried about losing anything because of that 100% backward compatibility thing they have always embraced. And besides, they haven’t added anything new to the core language in years; nobody thinks they will for quite a while, if ever.

Actually, I’m more worried about MacOS — there are apps I cannnot upgrade without upgrading my OS b/c of features added to support the M1/M2 chips that need some kind of core OS support that’s only in newer versions of the OS. I don’t want to upgrade my OS b/c I’ll lose access to apps that I use periodically that will cost me quite a bit to upgrade themselves.

I’m far more interested in what TMS is up to that leverages core Delphi technology than what is happening with Delphi. In fact, TMS competes with some of the extensions Embt is adding on to the Enterprise versions of Delphi, but they’re working on a “long plan” while Embt doesn’t even want to discuss theirs any more.

Renewals for the TMS ALL-ACCESS pass are a little cheaper than my Delphi maintenance plan renewal, but I get WAY MORE VALUE from TMS than I get with my Delphi renewal. Delphi will keep running, and I know TMS will continue supporting my version, so I’m not worried.

Most TMS stuff supports Lazarus; I think some supports FreePascal as well. I don’t really pay that much attention to either one. I’ve been working with Delphi for so long, I’m just really comfortable with my famiarity with it.

If you’re curious about what TMS offers, go to their website … they’ve got a TON of stuff. Most of it lets you download trial versions that will run within the IDE (probably why they support Delphi and Lazarus, but not FP).

-David Schwartz

On Dec 25, 2022, at 3:38 PM, Steve Litt via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:

David Schwartz via PLUG-discuss said on Sun, 25 Dec 2022 07:20:47 +0000
(UTC)

Steve does a nice job of defending the status quo,

Thank you!

but I’m eager to
move beyond that.

[snip]

First, let me say that I’ve made the majority of my income since 1997
as a Delphi developer. It did get quite a bit of traction between 1999
and 2007. I happen to think it’s the most productive coding platform
on the market today,

I think Clarion might give Delphi a run for the money, but I've dabbled
in Delphi and Lazarus enough to agree that they're very productive,
ESPECIALLY after you've really gotten to know them, which I haven't.

However, like Unix and Clarion before it, IMHO Delphi shot itself in
the foot by charging too much. IIRC Delphi started out being affordable
for the average kitchen table programmer, resulting in a lot of people
knowing how to do it. But like Unix and Clarion, they raised their
prices to the point where a kitchen table programmer couldn't afford
it, and it became strictly glass house. Which meant a scarcity of
people who could do Delphi, which inhibited its growth.

The first Lazarus free software Delphi Clone came in 2001, a little too
late.

Nothing in my preceding three paragraphs should be inferred to mean
that Delphi isn't super productive. Those paragraphs are merely a
possible explanation why Delphi became an also-ran, while C, C++, Java
and Python continue to be often used languages.

The problem is that hardly anybody is using Dephi for NEW product
development.

This isn't surprising given the acquisition price and annual
subscription. A developer can experiment with Python, Node, React, Vue,
and PHP for free, and after gaining prowess get right into a high
paying job. If the language doesn't work out for him or her, it's just
a few hours lost. Contrast this with Delphi, whose least sophisticated
offering is $1279 first year, $399 every year after. If it continued to
be priced the way Philippe Kahn priced things, Delphi just might
have ruled the world.

https://bestkeywordmixer.com/ <https://bestkeywordmixer.com/>

I wonder how long it would take to build that in any “full-stack” web
programming platform. Less than an hour?

I used Delphi + WebCore and I didn’t write a single line of javascript
— just ObjectPacal. And it’s not much code.

A real benefit to this type of thing is quickly coding up a prototype
that can actually evolve into the real thing after forming a basis for
discussion about specifications.

(BTW, WebCore also runs
within the free VS Code IDE, so you don’t even need Delphi. But it
still uses ObjectPascal.)

Will it work with FreePascal?

I’m tired of writing lines of code to describe what I want my software
to do. I want somthing more visual and less prone to error, that
requires less tacit knowledge of dozens of libraries and the latest
functions and calling parameters, and is easier to test. I just want
to be able to draw a diagram and say, “do this…” and it knows how.

Me too.

How would you like to give a Lazarus presentation at one of online
GoLUG meetings?

SteveT

Steve Litt
Autumn 2022 featured book: Thriving in Tough Times
http://www.troubleshooters.com/bookstore/thrive.htm

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