Delphi's 25th Birthday

I loved Delphi. It was amazing. But then they ate their own future by going to the stratosphere with enterprisey tool acquisitions nobody remembers the names of any more; then they fell back down to earth, and flirted with Kylix -- Delphi for linux -- but at a time of great upheaval in the linux desktop world, and it never really took off either.<p>Meanwhile, the former creator of Delphi had left for MS and created C# that at the time was already beating Delphi at its own game.<p>By the mid 2000s Delphi was already dead in the water: poor unicode support, no 64-bit compiler, and a language that hadn&#x27;t innovated much since the 90s.<p>It&#x27;s a shame, really. Delphi in the 90s was on its way to rule the world. Only then suddenly it wasn&#x27;t.

I used to love Delphi in the late 90s, and if someone could do a late-90s-Delphi-like experience for programming UI-heavy software today, and do it right, and in a way that properly integrates with the anno 2020 tech landscape, then I would love to use such a thing.<p>In a bout of late 90s nostalgia, I convinced my then-employer in 2011 to buy a license for the professional version of Delphi for a software project I was doing, and I was just absolutely shocked about how far it had fallen behind the curve. It seemed that attempting to support a modern tech ecosystem while maintaining some semblance of backwards-compatibility was giving it the worst of both worlds. Add to that enterprise bloat.<p>I don&#x27;t know what it&#x27;s like today, but I sincerely hope that someone will get it back on the right track (or has already done so, as I haven&#x27;t retried since my experience in 2011).

For those interested, Free Pascal and Lazarus, the free open source implementation of Delphi, is amazing. It has an active development community and works on most all platforms.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.getlazarus.org&#x2F;learn&#x2F;tutorials&#x2F;introduction&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.getlazarus.org&#x2F;learn&#x2F;tutorials&#x2F;introduction&#x2F;</a>

I find it ironic they describe it as “25 Years of Excellence” because, as much as people go on about the competition, what really broke Delphi was its poor quality control<p>I bloody loved that language, but all of the components had serious errors that resulted in crashes. To make it worse, they are their own dog food, meaning the IDE itself crashed all the time.<p>This wouldn’t have been so bad, but then VB5 happened, which was much, much worse semantically but absolutely rock solid.<p>Of course, then C# happened, but devs like me had already left the ecosystem. (And the less said about all that bundled cruft the better.)

A while ago I got to do some consulting&#x2F;auditing for a couple of companies in the medical field, and looking under the hood of their infrastructure, I was surprised to see that two of their most important apps for daily use (one a scheduling&#x2F;filing&#x2F;CRM behemoth, one a 3D analysis program) are developed in Delphi. You couldn&#x27;t tell it from the GUI but in one program directory I saw a VERY familiar ico on an exe and my interest was piqued). I went so far as to put one through a decompiler (IDR) to find out which version of Delphi had been used.<p>So, it seems that Delphi is alive, kicking serious butt and making some companies loads of money, developing beautiful modern enterprise apps.<p>I, like many others, got my start in programming with early Delphi versions in school - Delphi 3 truly was my first love and I recognize the splash screens that are currently on display at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;delphi.embarcadero.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;delphi.embarcadero.com</a> up until Delphi 2007, but 6 and 7 give me a warm, fuzzy feeling. We parted ways in the mid-2000s but I can honestly say, I never got back that feeling of joy and love for a language and a programming environment that I had for Pascal and Delphi (then again, I never had to deal with any messy legacy projects and component issues back then which surely drove some developers nuts).<p>Anyway... seeing that Delphi is still alive and watching a few YouTube videos about the new features it got over the last 10 years, including the stunning cross-platform development options for Android, iOS, web and PC (and apparently you can integrate with Sencha ExtJS, although I&#x27;m still unclear on how), I downloaded the free Delphi Community Edition - which is GREAT - and knocked out a beautiful little client-server app for a PoC over a weekend. Could hardly fathom the adrenaline rush I got from that...<p>I&#x27;m seriously considering putting in a purchase request for the Architect edition now... buying that at full price used to be a dream of teenage me and I think it&#x27;s not even as expensive as I remember :-) Can&#x27;t really justify it but then again, it&#x27;s a chicken-egg problem and you&#x27;ve got to start somewhere.<p>You probably can&#x27;t say that out loud, it being heresy and whatnot, but I could imagine that even now, schools could get more students to develop a love for programming on a wider and more versatile scale with Delphi Community Edition rather than Java or Python... There I said it, pls don&#x27;t kill.

What killed Delphi is $3000 per seat cost. Single starting developer or students cannot afford that. So there is no community and it&#x27;s impossible to find Delphi programmers.

Delphi was great for developing custom solutions for middle class companies. Not end-user stuff, but no enterprise either. That kind of software vanishing coincides with that whole business sector getting smaller.<p>From a technical perspective, it was my favorite attempt to tame a often horrible mess of half-baked database design and ad-hoc solutions -- you can do spaghetti code in every language, but the Delphi apps I saw were usually a bit better than their FoxPro&#x2F;Access&#x2F;FileMaker&#x2F;VB equivalents.

Congratulations!<p>We love making our software with Delphi since 2002 and it always provided us with a rock solid foundation until today.<p>In those 18 years (&gt;2.000.000 downloads) we never had a single critical failure. Ever.<p>The rapid prototyping capabilities help us to design and _experience_ user interface in no time.<p>Firemonkey allows us to create Mac &amp; Windows multi-plaform software from a single code base.<p>As a commercial software company that needs the job done reliable and efficient, Delphi just never disappointed us.<p>Yes, we know there is #C, .NET, Java but we see no need to change something that just works so well.<p>Cheers, Bartels Media from Germany

Still, to this day, I know of no other solution that beats Lazarus+Free Pascal in easiness of stitching together a cross-platform GUI program and just works out of the box.

Do you guys think that closed source general-purpose programming languages have any future? In the late 90s and early 2000s both Java and C# were closed source. Still, they became highly successful. Today many people wouldn&#x27;t even touch a language or a framework to build a business on unless it&#x27;s Open Source. It&#x27;s surprising how the programming landscape has changed in the past 20 years.

Wow, 25 years. Wasn&#x27;t onboard right from the start but something like Delphi 4 or 5 when I was in school. Ended that &quot;career&quot; with some cracked version of Delphi 7 Enterprise (obviously one needed the biggest version as a 16 year old!). I have good memories of Delphi, was my start into programming. Nice to see it&#x27;s still around.

In case you still want to work with it : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lazarus-ide.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lazarus-ide.org&#x2F;</a>

I made my first substantial, steady paycheck with Delphi. It was pretty great for its time, and it really lowered the barrier for entry into programming, and especially GUI-based programming. I wasn&#x27;t a huge fan of Pascal, so I ended up continuing to work in C++ Builder, but this stuff was _such_ a breath of fresh air back when Microsoft tooling sucked real bad, and Visual Studio was not &quot;visual&quot; at all. There were entire sites chock full of reusable Delphi&#x2F;C++ Builder components that you could just download and easily integrate into your code. Then Borland lost Anders Hejlsberg, and Microsoft gained Anders Hejlsberg, and within a few years we saw C# (clearly inspired by Object Pascal) and Windows Forms (clearly inspired by VCL).

At work our main product is all Delphi, some 300kLOC not counting the components and libraries (DevExpress, SecureBlackBox etc).<p>There&#x27;s been more and more talk about moving to something else, but a complete rewrite would likely be a death sentence so...<p>Still, for whipping up some quick GUI that does file IO and&#x2F;or DB stuff there&#x27;s not much that beats it. Though having to consume REST APIs or similar newfangled things is not such a pleasurable experience.

I started my lifelong love of coding with Turbo Pascal.<p>At the time we coded on a Sperry Univac 1100 system at varsity and it took bloody ages to compile&#x2F;debug&#x2F;run programs.<p>When I got a loaner PC and a copy of Turbo Pascal it was so amazing and fast.

From a developer viewpoint i can name three things that have stopped Delphi from competing with languages such as C# and JAVA.<p>1. No Garbage Collector. While some understanding of object lifetime is required, the constant need to manage allocation and de-allocation of objects takes a lot of energy away from the writing code.<p>2. Naming variables in a separate Var block. This is really cumbersome and detracts from the development experience. This was somewhat fixed in Delphi 10.3 which was released in 2018 or rather 23 years after the first Delphi version.<p>3. The unrealistic pricing of Delphi. The high cost of licensing has throughout the times meant that other programming languages have been chosen on this fact alone.<p>If (1) and (3) could be fixed then Delphi might stand a chance to gain significant market share.

Happy Birthday Delphi!<p>If Borland&#x27;s management hadn&#x27;t messed up, .NET and Java probably would never had taken off on PC world.

I learnt Pascal at Uni in the late 1970s and programmed in Turbo Pascal from 1986 on and then Delphi D2 since 1997. Slightly off-topic but two of my applications written in Turbo Pascal:Warlord and Quest, in the period 1988-1990 are still in use today. Both are postal games now run on the internet by kjcgames.com.<p>I&#x27;m currently maintaining and extending a major proptech application with 1.3 million loc of Delphi (XE7). Not so long ago the firm bought another firm with its own a 1.3 million loc of D7 code! There&#x27;s still a lot of Delphi code about.

Someone wrote a full audio tracker with ASIO, VST etc. in delphi in the 90s; a pretty impressive feat.<p>Its still avaliable: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.madtracker.org&#x2F;main.php" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.madtracker.org&#x2F;main.php</a><p>Thread talking about it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.madtracker.org&#x2F;forum&#x2F;viewtopic.php?t=180&amp;sid=7dff0c87463a4114348aeb21d869201c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.madtracker.org&#x2F;forum&#x2F;viewtopic.php?t=180&amp;sid=7df...</a>

Delphi, great tool, to write apps in. I can still remember the anticipation&#x2F;excitement of my dad when he discovered Sibyl was being build. Delphi for OS&#x2F;2! I found an interesting article about it: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.edm2.com&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;Sibyl,_a_Visual_Development_Environment_for_OS&#x2F;2" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.edm2.com&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;Sibyl,_a_Visual_Development_En...</a><p>My dad used OS&#x2F;2 for a long time :)

Ah, sweet Delphi ... To this day, it remains the best visual development environment that I have experienced over 25+ years. Powerful - yet intuitive and simple - UI, blazingly fast compilation speed, rich sets of built-in and third-party visual component libraries. I have started with Turbo Pascal, which was certainly the breakthrough at the time, and have also worked with C++ Builder and a bit with Interbase &amp; Firebird, but spent most of my Borland ecosystem time with Delphi. Recently, looking for potential better (Delphi-like) alternatives to modern convoluted world of Web development, I have explored Lazarus and several related projects, but none of them seems to provide the same comprehensive-yet-intuitive solution (backed by a solid company) that Delphi has done in the desktop development world. Perhaps, some good relevant projects will emerge in the future, but, until then, I will focus on mastering one of the &quot;standard&quot; modern Web development stacks (e.g., TypeScript + Vue) as well as exploring quite promising Blazor and, generally, WebAssembly technologies.

I basically learned how to program using Delphi 2, as a 16 year old who somehow ended up writing the LOB software for a small business owned by a family friend. Lots of good memories of that. My career would probably be farther behind if Delphi didn&#x27;t provide all the pieces to write a reasonable client-server application out of the box.

annual birthday party didn’t happen though - one developer couldn’t make it due to sickness and the second one decided not to go not wanting to feel alone ;-)

I programmed a lot 20 years ago as a hobby. I started at 13 with TP7 and some pascal books borrowed from my older brother. Later I &quot;got&quot; Delphi 1 and 3. Crated some smallish programs for myself, like a magic card db program when I started to play mtg. Fun times.

Delphi 1 on Win 3.11 and 4MB RAM. Long long time ago.

I learned object pascal (Delphi) in school in high school (now 18 years ago) and it was love at first sight. Coming from ansi c and ansi c ++, the lack of the garbage collector has never been a problem. But then the license costs stopped me as well as the fact that I am a supporter of the open source world. A few years later I discovered lazarus and the free pascal and I must say that since then I have never abandoned them (now 12 years in which I program for linux &#x2F; windows and for a few years also for mac os and raspberry all for free). If the delphi had lowered the licensing costs and made the product open source in its time it would have killed the market, but it was not so.

One small language feature I liked about Delphi was class properties.<p>I used Delphi at my first job, while studying in the university, where we were taught Java (and C and other languages), what I really disliked were Java&#x27;s getters and setters, which seemed like a clunky and pointless verbosity, compared to the properties in Delphi.<p>Python has the @property decorator, I wish other languages had something like that. Qt also has foo() and setFoo(), instead of getFoo(), which makes sense, and reduces verbosity and visual clutter.

On my current work the main enterprise system client is written with Delphi and still in active use. I worked for years to gradually replace it with web system with Java, but there&#x27;s still a lot to do. While I hate it with passion, because it was written by a few generations of developers with very poor practices, the mere fact that it exists and works is a testament to Delphi former glory.<p>Another component is Oracle 9i running on Itanium HPUX. At least it works fine.

Borland&#x27;s Turbo products were my entre into PC programming in the last 80s. It&#x27;s amazing, but not unusual, how quickly they descended into utter irrelevance.

Borland made a lot of mistakes with Delphi, but the best part of delphi was VCL was shipped with the source, it was a great introduction for the Win32 API world.

The language that everyone knows and now no one uses.

Here are a couple of links with some awesome Delphi applications <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;beyondvelocity.blog&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;19&#x2F;awesome-applications-built-in-delphi&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;beyondvelocity.blog&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;19&#x2F;awesome-applications-...</a><p>There many lists like these with many new apps popping up.

Delphi is great; just ensure you always stay subscribed. Their tech support team regard properly managing their own strict license system as &#x27;a courtesy&#x27; and will prevent you from installing the licensed software that you purchased. For that reason alone; I am out.

The GUI builder was great, the build times were great, the debugger was great.<p>What was not great was Pascal, especially their version of it. It didn&#x27;t even have a published formal grammar (as of Delphi 5), as I found out when trying to write some simple tooling for our codebase.

Excerpt:<p>&quot;I started my coding career using a Turbo Pascal clone for the Commodore Amiga, something called High-Speed Pascal, published by UK based company Hi-Soft.&quot;<p><i>It would be interesting if an open-source version of this Amiga Turbo Pascal clone - was available somewhere...</i>

Interesting fact about the name: if you wanted to talk to Oracle, you needed to go to Delphi.

Congrats! My new software (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;DocxManager.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;DocxManager.com</a> - site builder and document manager) is built with Delphi :)

For those missing Delphi, have you considered VS&#x2F;C#&#x2F;Winforms? I gonna tell you than its binaries as portable as Delphi&#x2F;Kylix(e.g. major platforms covered).<p>The language is much less annoying (oh how i hated Type and Var sections in the times). The gui programming style can be similar or can be modernized. The designer and component library is vastly improved. Third party components are cheap compared to today&#x27;s &quot;cloud&quot; prices. There are libs for everything. Its free. Can be compiled to native binaries(not sure this will leave &#x27;experimental&#x27;). Feels like a direct replacement to me.

Lets also don&#x27;t forget C++Builder :)

wow Delphi still around ^_^ Congrats!

OK,<p>At the time of the Delphi 8 release I went to a Delphi conference to get to know the community better. This was 2003 or so? I was evaluating whether or not to get more licenses for our company so we could put extra effort into developing Delphi for .NET.<p>Let&#x27;s just say that I found the people there to be rude and insulting. Not just the people at the conference there but also by some of Borland staff there as well. A joke was played on me which I won&#x27;t get into here but I didn&#x27;t - and don&#x27;t - appreciate being bullied.<p>Let&#x27;s just say that the next day I abandoned Delphi and moved our entire company to Visual Studio and never looked back.