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by cwbrandsma 489 days ago
The language that could have been. I did a bunch of Delphi around the Delphi 5 and 6 era. It was a nice middle ground between VB6 and C++.

Unfortunately it made my startup more difficult to sell. Eventually Microsoft bought it, but there were a lot of rounds.

3 comments

Delphi is still reasonably popular in some niches. It has a powerful but easy WYSIWYG GUI builder and is close to the hardware without being C++, making it decently popular for tooling for industrial hardware.

Though their website makes me suspect they have given up trying to find new customers and are just building new features for the customers they have

In Germany we still have enough folks to keep a conference going.

https://entwickler-konferenz.de/en/

I started with version 1.0. Such an incredibly elegant language. I choose it not to feed the Microsoft Monopoly, but in the end, and after the most incredible f*ck ups by Borland, VB won. I used D7 for many years. Now I use it only as a hoby language.

What do you mean Microsoft bought it? IT was never bought by MS.

I think he means that Microsoft bought his own startup whose product was written in Delphi.
I think "it" is the startup, not Delphi.
Microsoft did snipe some of the key people at Borland who created Delphi to get from VB4 to VB6.
Microsoft also bought Skype which was also written with Delphi.