I started using Delphi 3 and stopped at 7, migrating to web development (Rails, Django, etc.).<p>Delphi was magical. Nothing compares to Delphi's productivity.
Rails is good, but it doesn't even come close to Delphi's productivity.
People love Go's speed. Go is glacially slow compared to Delphi.
The WYSIWYG form editor is incredible. I can use Delphi 3 on a Windows machine with 16 MB of RAM.<p>VCL is fantastic; the idea of components and memory management is incredible, simple, and it works.<p>Delphi is my first language; I studied VCL code and I love the code, the style. They were practical: Instead of Hash, they used TStrings (a list of strings) and the visual components also used them, like in the items of a Listbox!<p>Delphi could have been the platform for the web. Imagine a VCL for the web (VCLW), where you could change the target architecture or something like that and, presto, you'd have a web server running with VCL code!<p>That never happened. What happened was a series of bad ideas for the web, bad in their essence.<p>And Delphi invested in many projects doomed to failure, such as CORBA, three-tier architecture, MDA... Kylix!!!! Of course, Borland was very poorly managed. The CEOs were crazy. "Let's fight IBM." Delphi was abandoned. It's over.<p>I tried a new version of Delphi a few years ago. Wow, it was full of bugs! It had basic problems like compilation not working, Random crashing several times, etc. For me the new versions are just a way to profit from projects stuck in Delphi.<p>I tried Lazarus in the past, but it's extremely slow and I can't use my components in Lazarus without rewriting a lot of things.<p>To me, Delphi is languishing in an induced coma, breathing the air of the past, which is becoming increasingly rare. It's a shame.
Sometimes I miss the times where you had a compact development environment, wit one installer. Your source produced a mostly self contained binary in a reasonable size, you had nice debugging support and quick turnaround times for a compiled language even on a small development machines. And all that for attractive price for a perpetual license (Borland times).<p>Today it seems I have to give the producer my email address for the 'free' "Delphi History PDF".
Well, times have changed. :)
The way I saw it in 1995 was that Delphi was the fastest way to create a full windows desktop app and do it as single compiled-to-native-code executable at that critical time it was released. The slightly-later 32-bit version was powerful and gave your app some staying power; a Delphi-generated executable file would likely still run today.
I have very fond memories of working with Delphi 5 and 2005 in the early 2000s. Both the language and IDE were a real pleasure to work with, and they were head and shoulders better than anything from Microsoft at that time. The community was small but enthusiastic and supportive as well.<p>It would be hard to justify Delphi in a new project today - not because of the tooling or language, but because of the prohibitive license costs.
Is it still alive? Last time I used it was around 2005.<p>One nice thing though as I remember was that ruins of Russian Borland branch gave us Jetbrains.
I remember taking an onsite class to learn Delphi. The class was taught in St Petersburg Florida. Nice place. At the time, I was admiring the tool that Borland created and thought to myself this is a very nice IDE. Too bad my company was switching to all things .Net. The difference between Visual Studio and the Delphi IDE was gut wrenching.
When I was a kid, my older brother worked for Borland. He got me 2 packs of stickers that said "Delphi developers do it better!!!" in red font and a yellow background.
When I was starting out as a kid learning to make applications, moving from VB6 to Delphi was such a huge improvement.<p>Tempted to use a client's plotter and roll of paper to print this off.
Happy birthday Delphi, you made me a lot of money :-)<p>I am guessing most Delphi developers like me, have either retired or have moved to Linux. I have done both recently and I unfortunately do not see a new generation following in behind me. I hope it survives as it was and still is a nice IDE and language to work in, though I'm guessing newer Pascal developers will opt for Lazarus
The original borland delphi had very creative installer graphics:<p><a href="https://www.gladir.com/SOFTWARE/DELPHI1/delphi1-install5.png" rel="nofollow">https://www.gladir.com/SOFTWARE/DELPHI1/delphi1-install5.png</a>
The programmers must have been playing <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_Drive_(1987_video_game)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_Drive_(1987_video_game)</a>
That was before Delphi 2.0 even :)
Straight up, nobody uses it anymore.
Weird but FreePascal is fairly solid for its niche.
What is dead may never die
The hardest part of maintaining a long-term project is resisting the urge to over-engineer early on. Striking a balance between a lean core and future extensibility is an art form that often gets ignored in favor of shipping fast.
31 years old and it can't run on GNU/Linux. What a waste. The future of Delphi is darker than ever.