[TheJimMcKeeth]

Curious how you feel Idera ruined Delphi? Is it the introduction of a free Community Edition with all the features of Professional including mobile platform support? Or maybe the all new Linux compiler?

Sounds like you haven't looked at Delphi in a while. It is better than ever in my opinion.

[thijsvandien]

How about some full disclosure here? Spreading that opinion is a main part of your job (Developer Advocate at Embarcadero/Idera).

[kcartlidge]

I used Delphi from v2 up to v7, and recently looked again due to the Community Edition as back in the day it was excellent.

I don't mind paying for software (JetBrains, NCrunch, Wallaby, etc). However given that the "free" edition costs over $1,000 once you generate $5,000 from it (and that's for only a single year of updates and no enterprise database access unless you double that price) it isn't quite as generous a free edition as one might assume from your comment.

I love Pascal (for comparison I also do C#, Node, Go, Python, Ruby, and PHP) but I'll stick with Lazarus/Free Pascal - my Delphi days are long gone at those insane prices.

[gaze]

Look at the amount of Delphi code being written as a fraction of all new code being written, today and 20 years ago, and tell me how the Delphi community hasn't been ruined.

[dvdkon]

I don't think Delphi has been "ruined", but I think its heyday has definitely passed, because it wasn't flexible enough when the prices of tooling plummeted over the last 20 or so years. It's nice that there's a reasonable free option for the platform, but that would have been a big deal some 15 years back. Nowadays even Microsoft's .NET is open source and so are their new libraries. Proprietary IDEs are still alive and well, but the popular ones have open-source platforms underneath.

I'm not saying Delphi should go full FLOSS. The company seems to be doing well enough and not everyone needs to chase maximum adoption. I just wanted to express the reasons I see for not even considering Delphi for any greenfield projects.

[rob74]

Yup... when Embarcadero bought Delphi from Borland in 2010, the pricing scheme and lack of a "community version" made it clear that they were considering it a "cash cow" and weren't putting a priority on expanding its market share. Providing a free version now is a bit late. Delphi is still unmatched if you want to quickly build a GUI application, but the Delphi language itself feels a bit too dated to attract new developers - and I'm saying this as someone who has used Delphi in my "day job" for ~ ten years and as a hobby for even longer, but around 2010 I kinda drifted away from it. Now, if someone would take the GUI designer of Lazarus and pair it with, say, the Go language (which, although it's not obvious, has a lot of Pascal-family DNA in it, and badly lacks a good GUI story), that might be an interesting proposition...

[badsectoracula]

> Now, if someone would take the GUI designer of Lazarus and pair it with, say, the Go language (which, although it's not obvious, has a lot of Pascal-family DNA in it, and badly lacks a good GUI story), that might be an interesting proposition...

Uh, garbage collector aside, Go has less features as a language than even Delphi 1, let alone Free Pascal which runs circles around it.

[thijsvandien]

Personally, I think the tooling is a much bigger issue than the language.

[AtlasBarfed]

It is entirely possible for something to be "ruined", and then open sourced as a last resort when the ship has long sailed for that being a useful tactic.

So while I haven't followed the ecosystem since Turbo Pascal for DOS (when I wrote a Battletech simulator over summer in college and had the entire runtime API committed to memory aside from pie graphs)..

My impression of it over the years is that it was closed source for way too long as whoever owned Delphi tried to ride its legacy paying customers as they dwindled to nothingness, and then open sourced it.

I have the same vague impression of smalltalk as well, but I never programmed in it.

[CRConrad]

Your impression is wrong: Delphi hasn't been "open sourced".

[gramie]

Maybe it's laying off devoted long-time staff and hiring cheap contractors. The amount of institutional memory they lost is astounding.

[imagine99]

Oh, I can answer that one: By purposefully ruining - and continuing to ruin - a great community of developers around Delphi.

I apologize in advance for what will be a salty (but truthful, I hope) statement, and it was invited, so I would like to give it in the hope that it might be heard by someone who can do something about it.

You, Idera, just can't get it into your heads that the success of a programming language is measured in how many people are using it, learning it, messing around with it. Not how many Enterprise customers you have that you have locked into buying upgrades.

There are statements out there (even from veteran Delphi people I really respect) who seriously argue that "we can't put out a free version of Delphi because it will be abused". I can barely respond to that in friendly words, I'll only say that's total madness. Even purveyors of software orders of magnitude more expensive than Delphi (architecture and 3D modelling come to mind, even some movie and music producers) have understood that if you make it available at no charge to students and young people, to groups who just don't have the money, they will be the ones that will buy it at full price as soon as they have the chance.

It happened to me. I think I can admit it here, as many have: My first steps into programming where with a copy of Delphi on an unmarked CD decades ago. It was a rush, a high like I've never experienced again. Truly my first love. And when I later got some job responsibility, I actually got a purchase order through for a Delphi Architect edition (the most expensive SKU). But these times are long gone and are unlikely to repeat because today's students don't have the Delphi community anymore that I had to teach me.

But Delphi's current (and previous) owners just don't get that. To them, Delphi seems to be something "elite", something only people paying thousands of bucks should get access to. Taking free money from a few legacy firms, who's going to say not to that?

No, you will not extract a couple thousand bucks from a small student programmer. No, you will not get programmers in poorer countries to buy your software at these prices. You will especially not stop bigger organizations or people who truly want to abuse it. If they need it, they will pirate it, just like they do with Adobe, Microsoft etc. Don't think you're better and cleverer than those guys. The joke is probably (I suspect) that pirated versions are still easier to install than getting the dated 12-months community edition of Delphi with all its nagging.

One could probably find an argument where it would be fair to pay good money for new Delphi versions every now and then. But you don't put nearly enough effort in improving the IDE (the object inspector is still horrible to use if you're doing UI-heavy work - there is e.g. still no "favorites" tab), you still don't support PNG and JPG across the board or make it possible to play an MP4 file in the mediaplayer component. No transparent TEdit, TMemo, a lot of new component implementations are half-hearted at best. The list of little buggy, annoying things that are unchanged for 20 years is endless. You just don't care.

The only one you hurt with this, Idera, is yourself and the community (and by that, again, yourself). The Delphi community was one of the most vibrant and multi-faceted in the world. Thousands of components for anything you could possibly imagine. Great forums and message boards that put StackExchange to shame. All that was literally choked off because Embarcadero wanted to make an extra buck. It was not because of Python or Java. Those just filled a void you purposefully created.

And now Delphi 10.4 has been out for almost 10 months and you still haven't been able to publish a free community edition for it, still insisting on rubbing it in everybody's face that you consider community edition users to be barely legal freeloaders who can do just well with an old and buggy edition (which e.g. still doesn't support the new Chromium Edge browser component afaik).

So, shame on you Idera/Embarcadero. And, frankly, shame on the old Delphi guys supporting this behavior and not taking a stand for a great language and a great community and for not forcing Idera to do things differently. You guys still have a voice, still have name recognition in the community, use it to talk sense and reason, effect change!

I for one still think, like several others here, that Delphi even today remains unsurpassed in several aspects (especially in the rapid development of UI and Windows-heavy apps). But that's thanks to a lack of great alternatives, not thanks to Idera's innovation, that's for sure. So don't pat yourself on the back.

All is not lost but we'd have to see a major offensive in terms of openness from Delphi's current owners. It sure would be awesome to make Delphi just half as great as it once was. But why not start small: Put the Community Edition on the same release cycle as the paid versions. Update the UI a bit with some irresistible great features. Then fix bugs and innovate, go into schools and invest, invest, invest in community. It might just pay off...