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by dvdkon 1951 days ago
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.
1 comments
rob74 1951 days ago
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...
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badsectoracula 1951 days ago
> 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.

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thijsvandien 1951 days ago
Personally, I think the tooling is a much bigger issue than the language.
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