[astrodust]

Delphi was really a "Concorde moment" in that it was actually rapid, both in terms of development speed, and performance, which was somehow forgotten as the web emerged.

Forgotten to the point that people thought Visual Basic was a good idea.

[misja111]

Delphi was great but a major deal breaker was that is was not free to use.

[badsectoracula]

Early versions of Delphi were cheap enough ($99) even a high schooler could pool the money to buy it (or, more realistically, ask their parents :-P). That lasted until Delphi 5 IIRC.

The real dumb move (though TBH i can only say that in hindsight) was that they made a free Linux version with Kylix, the license required any programs released to be under GPL but they didn't release Kylix itself as GPL.

This was in very early 2000s, when GPL wasn't the boogieman among developers that seems to be nowadays with all the permissive licenses, desktop software was still something people wanted, commercial software wouldn't touch GPL and yet a lot of new programmers were onboarding Linux. Having Delphi/Kylix full GPL with a CLA (like some other projects) would mean that a) Kylix would become part of various Linux distributions, especially during a time when distributions were the main source for tools for Linux users, b) anyone working on FLOSS would both use and improve the tool, c) mindshare among programmers would improve as anyone will be able to try it out for free (as long as they used Linux, but many programmers - especially younger programmers at the time - didn't mind that), d) companies, enterprises, etc that wanted to sell shareware or just didn't want the rules GPL imposed would still need to buy the full program

Sadly this seemed to be yet another case of when Borland started losing touch with programmers in the 90s.

[StillBored]

For students and hobbyist, yes and was probably a dumb MBA lead decision because it stops the developer pipeline.

OTOH, As many tool vendors will tell you its foolish to dismiss a tool simply based on price. If your paying your developers $100 an hour even tiny improvements in productivity can easily pay for a $1000 or more tool. Just the compilation speed alone vs C/etc is probably worth the 5+ mins a day in savings.

[jacquesm]

It is, but it stops a large number of people from being conversant with your tool and that in turn almost guarantees market failure. I've got a super luxurious toolchain on my computer because of the free software movement and it may not be as flashy as what you can get commercially but it suffices for all of my needs.

[pkolaczk]

The later versions (somewhere after 2005) were also very buggy and sluggish. They produced fast code, but you really needed a powerful workstation.

[wink]

With 20 years of hindsight I am not saying I can objectively talk about it but I kinda hated Pascal, with syntax and everything and so I didn't really try Delphi.

Visual Basic 5 was kinda awesome.

It may very well be that if I had looked at both again after, say, 5 years of programming I might have different views, but even now I still look back fondly on VB, it got shit done, esp if you needed a quick UI with not a lot of business logic.