26 Years of Delphi

Great memories.<p>Delphi was my first programming language. I learned it from programming magazines I used to buy when I was about 17 years old or so.<p>My dad had a small supermarket at that time, and I remember the first useful program I built in my life was a small application to scan discount coupons he used to accept. Those coupons had a barcode and I discovered the hand scanners we used were just doing keyboard emulation. So I wrote an application in Delphi that would allow my father to scan all coupons at the end of the day and then print a sheet with a table of quantities, amounts, subtotals and totals of the money he had in coupons... something he was doing by hand before this. He was so happy with this program.<p>The program itself was very, very, very shitty, but it worked well for him. For example, at that point I didn&#x27;t even knew that arrays existed, so all the logic and multiplication was done manually, like label43 = textInput25 * textInput24 * 0.1.<p>I also remember that, in order to send the form to the printer, I wrote code to go control by control, change the background to white, the border to black, calling something like form.printForm() and then restoring all the colors. This caused a horrible flickering when printing... but hey... it worked!!<p>The best memories I have was that probably, this was the first time I had that &quot;feeling&quot; of having built something useful to somebody. And certainly the best moment was when one of his suppliers who also accepted those coupons asked us for a copy of the program. Great times.<p>Some days I feel like I&#x27;ve never have built something as useful again since then .

I think I&#x27;ve posted it before, but I&#x27;ll repeat myself nevertheless: Delphi was my first contact with programming.<p>I was probably 13 or 14 years old and had no idea what I was doing, but I could resize the windows, add items to lists, change the color of Strings and place buttons and stuff like this.<p>So, _obviously_ I needed the Delphi 6 Enterprise edition which a friend had (pirated of course) and gave it to me on one of those really cheap CD-R with that distinctive plastic smell.<p>One of the first &quot;real programs&quot; we wrote was something to read sensor data via the parallel port. It was for a school project where a belt had to move and then stop, once the light barrier would sense something. We killed lots of parallel ports in doing that, because we just didn&#x27;t knew how to do it.<p>Didn&#x27;t really write anything more useful at that time, but it showed me that there&#x27;s a world behind what we see and know as &quot;programs&quot;. Maybe it laid some fundations in my brain, who knows.<p>Every time I see Delphi pop up I think I should probably have a look at it. But I&#x27;m a web monkey now. Lost for everything good, but I like to think back of the 14 year old me. Better times.

In any discussion about Delphi, you really should also mention Lazarus (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lazarus-ide.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lazarus-ide.org&#x2F;</a>). It&#x27;s more mature (i.e. more cross platform) than Delphi, and fully open source. It&#x27;s based on the Free Pascal Compiler (FPC) (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freepascal.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freepascal.org&#x2F;</a>) (also open source).

Yeah, Idera, tell me how great Delphi was before you friggin&#x27; ruined it, like everything you touch.<p>Anyway, we&#x27;ve recently had &quot;FoxPro&quot; guest-star here, and Delphi definitely was one that took its lunch money. Decent small-business relational databases appeared, and people were eager to marry it with fancy GUIs -- maybe even with that new-fangled 32 bit Windows Microsoft was promising. Visual Basic was what Microsoft offered. But for many, the language felt a bit awkward, as did the programming paradigm. I&#x27;m leaning a bit out of the meaphorical window here, but there&#x27;s an argument to be made that VB was closer to 4GLs than &quot;conventional&quot; programming languages.<p>Delphi just really hit a sweet spot. A fast Pascal compiler was to be expected from them, the OO features were available in previous Turbo Pascal versions, too. But all very nicely integrated into a truly RAD IDE -- if what you wanted to develop rapidly was a CRUD Windows app.<p>Still one of the best experiences doing that. I&#x27;d have done more if for a while my corporate masters didn&#x27;t demand Java&#x2F;Swing or sacrificing goats (MFC).<p>And then mobile devices finally ruined every chance of ever getting a decent desktop GUI again.

I remember when I turned 16 and all I wanted as birthday present was a license for Delphi 2009. If I remember correctly, it costed more than €1k at that time. Obviously I got something else.<p>When I learned about the free Visual Studio Express, I switched to .Net development and never used Delphi again.<p>This experience shaped me and all tools I will ever create will be available for free to students and kids.

I started in Turbo Pascal, and migrated to Delphi when it came along, it was cheap enough that I had the pro version up until I moved into SysAdmin. Now that I want to dive back into production programming, Delphi has basically priced itself out of existence for me.<p>Lazarus is a good alternative, a bit buggy, but at least I can afford it. Eventually I&#x27;ll probably implement a Pascal layer on top of Racket.<p>As far as straight up GUI toolkits go, there&#x27;s no better tool than Delphi. I doubt I&#x27;ll ever have something that powerful again.

Delphi had, by far, the best documentation that I&#x27;ve ever encountered. Every Win API method was documented, explained and illustrated with an example. Delphi 4 manual was so much easier to follow than Microsoft&#x27;s own Win16&#x2F;32 API help in VS C++ (which I actually used more back then).

A lot of this was good, reminding us that the world of 1995 when Delphi was first released was quite different from now. But the idea that &quot;The video games industry was in its early days&quot; in 1995 is a bit of a weird assertion. So the 8-bit and 16-bit eras didn&#x27;t count?

26 years ago Delphi was pretty affordable and you didn&#x27;t need a lawyer to protect yourself from the licensor too :)

Delphi 2 was my introduction to programming. It was on a pirate CD-ROM together with many other programs - Office, C++ Builder, Visual Studio. Once I discovered it (because of course I&#x27;d play with all the programs on the pirate CD), I was amazed.<p>At the time I didn&#x27;t know of an easier way to draw windows and buttons and stuff, and have them do what you expect them to do (Visual Basic? Pfft, edgy, tweenage me scoffed at the idea of compiling pseudocode that had to be interpreted at runtime. And don&#x27;t tell tweenage me about MFC, past me would never have admitted that using the MS foundation classes in C++ was too difficult for my dumb brain. I also didn&#x27;t &quot;get&quot; C++ so couldn&#x27;t get on with Borland&#x27;s C++ builder. But object pascal... object pascal was structured and easy to understand and compiled to machine code in an eyeblink so was therefore superior to everything else!!! Man, what a butt I was...)<p>First program I wrote and released was a game editor. Someone had reverse engineered a certain video game&#x27;s file and data structure and documented the offsets and sizes of all the stats of the entities in the game. I used that information and slapped a shitty GUI with comboboxes and dropdown lists and number fields (with no bounds checking I think), together with some very dodgy file read&#x2F;write code I part copied from some geocities page and part copied from some reference book code, and I made my first game editor. People actually used it! Man, that felt cool.<p>Man, what a butt I was, I was the very definition of an &quot;I am a programmer&quot; meme.<p>Later on that information made its way into a UGE module so my program was no longer relevant.<p>I remember borrowing Delphi reference books from the library and, not having enough computer time, hand writing my code to learn.<p>Good times. I didn&#x27;t know Delphi was still in use, I am obviously not in the development line anymore. 26 years! I feel old!

Delphi was great. I remember downloading it (pirated obviously) over a 14k connection. It took like a day.<p>The killer feature was that it could build stand lone executables with no runtime.<p>On one hand I really miss those days. On the other hand, what we have today is far superior. Its a great time to be alive for a kid who wants to learn how to program.

Delphi, ah the memories. I use to make a fair amount of money in the late 90s making shareware applications with Delphi. It was the most productive I have ever been as a developer. But, the world moved to web fairly rapidly, so I had to move on to the web.

FWIW, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.google.com&#x2F;g&#x2F;borland.public.delphi.non-technical&#x2F;c&#x2F;dK1AaC3QTaM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.google.com&#x2F;g&#x2F;borland.public.delphi.non-techni...</a> List of cool applications written in Delphi (long thread, 2006)

Ah delphi, earned some of my first money as a student doing two awesome projects in Delphi that worked for the next 10 years...<p>I still haven’t found anything with such a good interface builder (Xcode comes close, but it’s still worse imho)

Ah, I remember being in middle school and buying a huge book seeming to be 6 inches thick with a copy of Delphi 1.0. This was what started it for me. The really cool thing was that in Delphi, you could often import Visual Basic components. Me and my friend would look for components that other VB programs would use and try to use them in our own projects. GUI creation is second to none with Delphi&#x2F;Lazarus and I love the event based system, but nowadays I find writing in Pascal a little...not fun.

&gt; When Delphi was released in 1005<p>Lovely typo, although it undeniably feels as if Delphi has been around forever.

I started learning Delphi in 2003 (or 2002?) when in high school.<p>At that time, not many of us were interested in programming, probably only the &quot;geeks&quot;. Of course, typically high schoolers prefer sports, online games, or music.<p>I taught myself QB, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, VB. Well, VB was my 1st exposure to Windows programming. Making Windows apps was very easy. I wrote tiny web browser (using built-in IE component), audio player, a tool to bypass Ctrl-Alt-Del (copied from Planet Source Code), simple Symbian games (with AppForge Mobile VB) etc.<p>Then I found a book explaining database programming... with Delphi. I believe it was Delphi 6. Unlike MSVC, Delphi was surpisingly easy to learn. Sure, I already had some Pascal knowledge. After that, I ported most of my existing VB codes into Delphi.<p>1 year before graduation, I found another book about mobile app programming. At that time, smartphones weren&#x27;t that popular unlike today. Only really rich kids who used Sony P900 or Nokia 9210i. J2ME-enabled mobiles phones were relatively more popular, at least. And that&#x27;s how I joined the Java world, which until today is still is.<p>I kinda miss Delphi. Yes, I&#x27;m aware there&#x27;s an open source alternative: Lazarus. Let&#x27;s see if I still can write something interesting with it :)

Whenever I heard “Delphi”, I thought it was an ancient programming language that older colleagues used to mention (“... &lt;anecdote&gt; ... many moons ago, back when I used to program Delphi.”).<p>But so Delphi really is&#x2F;was a GUI editor? Something like an ancient Qt Creator? And according to Wikipedia it is not even a language but is using “Object Pascal”. Wild.<p>I wonder why this never comes up when I read a out cross platform GUI frameworks...

Sadly it was killed by so many bad decisions from Borland. It was really a great tool.<p>Maybe if Microsoft had bought it instead of &quot;just hiring&quot; Anders Hejlsberg?

We still maintain our flagship software in Delphi. We were on Delphi 6 until a year ago we jumped to modern Delphi. We were surprised to learn that the Delphi installer was quite broken and the 1 year license doesn&#x27;t include install help after the first month! Needless to say, we promptly started migrating our code to something else.

Oh man, I learned to code in Pascal writing a BBS in the 90s.<p>Back in the 90s, I had the option of taking a BASIC or Pascal course over at the High School next door to my middle school; I opted for the latter, and started studying C shortly thereafter but wrote almost everything in Turbo, later Borland Pascal and ultimately did a few Delphi projects. I think I had to save up for a <i>year</i> to buy a <i>really real</i> license for the development environment (12 years old on a $5&#x2F;wk allowance with $10&#x2F;lawn mow ... it took a while). Gotta say, I kind of miss it. Wonder if they ever updated the old `crt` pascal library; I believe it&#x27;s purpose was to simply allow basic terminal text coloring&#x2F;features, its name was always a little odd. Folks, today, might not make the connection at all. :)

BTW from memory Delphi was named as such as it was the main route to Oracle which was the most common enterprise database. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Delphi" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Delphi</a>

One of my competitors used Delphi to write their software. One part of the software ran under the print spooler so when 64-bit Windows came along they were stuffed as the 64-bit version of Delphi was slow to arrive. I did quite well out of that.

Unfortunately, I&#x27;ve never used Delphi. But the article makes me nostalgic for the old school Borland style GUIs with icons on the buttons and stippled backgrounds. Or the CTL3D style which was really modern at the end of the Win 3.1 era.

Delphi! Purchased ver.3.0 back in the day, it was excellent.<p>So, who&#x27;s using Delphi in prod anno 2021?

That was amazing times when with Delphi you can build an app with database which automates some tasks and sell it to local business. Easy money. Lawyers, libraries, trade businesses, even gas station !

I loved Pascal and I did most of my DOS programming with it until DJGPP.<p>But for Windows in jumped right to Visual C++. All because Delphi was “dying”, at least in popularity. So I never got to give it a chance.

I am using Pascal like language daily at work. Its modern version of Pascal powering modern ERP ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;dynamics365&#x2F;business-central&#x2F;dev-itpro&#x2F;developer&#x2F;devenv-programming-in-al" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;dynamics365&#x2F;business-centra...</a> )<p>I have background in Javascript, Golang, Typescript and all other modern web technologies but I have to say I enjoy working with it and its very highly productive for me.

As a solo developer, the price of a new license is kind of crazy to keep upgrading. Otherwise would continue to develop in it. Loved delphi, hated the paradox database that came with it.

When it first came out, Delphi was streets ahead of the main Microsoft options available at the time, namely VB and Visual C++. I remember it with great affection.

Another year and another Delphi post.<p>Started with Delphi 2, the productivity benefits vs VB were amazing. Plus managing code and having a usable object based language.<p>I went from nothing to a PLC(programmable logic controller) to database manufacturing floor delivery system in 3 weeks for my first app. Amazing productivity.<p>Cut to now, I have a custom MES&#x2F;ERP app written in D7 I still support or for 3 sites. 20 years old.<p>Every couple of weeks I have to boot up the VM and do a few things.

A similar article from a year ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;damieng.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;14&#x2F;delphi-birthday-my-story" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;damieng.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;14&#x2F;delphi-birthday-my-story</a><p>(via <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24705109" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24705109</a>, but no comments there).

I remember using Delphi 1 on a 386 under Windows 3.1 and watching and even listening to the GUI reloading from the swap file component by component. I had enough RAM but I think the Windows memory manager was not great. Today, I&#x27;d throw the PC out the window, but at the time, there was something reassuring about it. But maybe I&#x27;m embellishing my memories.

1988 was the year I started using Pascal while still in college. I developed and released a general ledger software for small accounting firms in 1989 using it. Sold 20 copies, bought myself a printer. It was a great experience that I could never duplicate to this day. It became better with Delphi release, so easy to develop UI using those drag and drop widgets.

Out here in the battlegrounds of web development, this article makes me miss the safe cocoon of Delphi and Windows development.

This article made me feel really, really old!

I have a love-hate relationship with Delphi&#x2F;Pascal. Love the language and what I can do with it. Hate the buggy IDE. Love that fpc is n open-source pascal compiler. Hate the the Lazarus IDE was difficult to use (when I last tried it a few years ago). Sad that so many comments talk about pascal in the past tense.

I liked Delphi when I used it a bunch in the mid-to late 1990s (mainly Delphi 2.0).<p>Three years ago, I ported a Delphi application called StoryHarp from back then in my spare time to TypeScript&#x2F;Mithril+Tachyons. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pdfernhout&#x2F;storyharp-js" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pdfernhout&#x2F;storyharp-js</a><p>Years earlier, I had made a parsing tool I wrote years ago to help with some of that -- which I have not made publicly available because I am not sure about the copyright status of the grammar files I started from. Some random notes on the conversion process which involved a lot of hand conversions: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pdfernhout&#x2F;storyharp-js&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;conversion-notes.txt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pdfernhout&#x2F;storyharp-js&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;conve...</a><p>Before and after the automated conversion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pdfernhout&#x2F;storyharp-js&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;converted_source&#x2F;used" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pdfernhout&#x2F;storyharp-js&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;conve...</a><p>But given the way Delphi type declarations are similar to TypeScript type declarations (designed by the same person), and you need to make some major changes to redo the UI in Mithril, doing the entire thing by hand (and with the help of some regexes to replace stuff) might not have been that much harder?<p>Still have a couple of other applications from those years I want to covert to TypeScript someday (a garden simulator called Garden With Insight and a 3D botanical plant design tool called PlantStudio).<p>That said, Delphi is still a great language -- even if I perhaps regret using it overall instead of just sticking with Smalltalk, which was harder then to deliver an application with. We had also been using C++ at one point before that too, and Delphi was a lot easier to work with than C++ in the 1990s -- even if I&#x27;d guess dealing with C++ code nowadays might be easier overall with improved standard libraries, memory leak tools, and faster computers? My wife who was working on the projects with me then also knew Pascal well from academic projects, so Delphi was also easier for her than C++. However, same as me, she liked Smalltalk better. If we had know then that something like Squeak would come along eventually, we might have stuck with Smalltalk over Delphi.<p>I also have a music-related Java Android app I&#x27;d like to port to TypeScript, so it is not just Delphi. I just would like having some past major projects in a widely-supported language I&#x27;m using now for other things and which runs easily in the browser.

I still occasionally come across Delphi in use today, and even new projects are started using it as the core technology. It definitely wouldn&#x27;t be my choice but it is interesting to see how productive people can be with this even now.

Back in Windows 3.1 if you have a 44,373 KB free RAM then it was really a lot. Anyone still using Delphi for large-scale new projects? I&#x27;m pretty sure there are a bunch of legacy ones around the corner but what about new ones?

I did not used Delphi but did a a few Windows apps with C# and Windows Forms int he past, I am curious in the present day for Windows only dev what would be the advantage of using Delphi over C# with VS or Intellij.

Nice memories, I keep trying to find Delphi soul in Java and .NET.

Delphi was amazing in the Borland days, not so much after then!

Doing backend apps with Delphi is very fun and productive!

I remember when I discovered Delphi, it was in circa 2001-2002.<p>At the time I was 16-17 and knew how to program with PHP (I was modding phpBB at the time), tried with PHP-GTK to build user interfaces, but found it not that great.<p>Then I discovered Delphi, already knew some parts of Pascal. But what a gem it was, in a matter of days I felt like I was totally proficient, could create windows, manage resize, add components, tweak colors, run background tasks, want a listview? just drag it. Need a HTTP call? drag the component (can&#x27;t remember the name), connect onclick to it, and you&#x27;re done. I recall the website torry.net with plenty of libraries to download.<p>I also tried Borland C++, but wasn&#x27;t good enough with it, and as I remember discovering that even DevC++ was written with Delphi. Simply figuring out it was good enough for me.<p>I created so much things with it until like 2004-2005 I think, like a complete terminal on my Windows, re implementing standard commands all within Delphi. Wrote some games companion for Rainbow Six and RavenShield [1], fetching statistics and available servers, scanning games to find your friends, downloaded thousand times. An alt-tab which worked with Quake III that at the time was also downloaded hundreds of times, a companion to The All Seeing Eye (server browsing), a small Photoshop tool where I learnt how to create my own filters like Gaussian blurs and so on [2], key mapping profiles for plenty of games by modifying INI files [3], a code formatter inside DevC++ [4], ...<p>I have lost all of my source code (didn&#x27;t knew how to backup things at the time), still have some binaries and screenshots for posterity<p>I remember this period with nostalgia and great passion.<p>Thank you Delphi for the good times and all the fun, this is when I really knew what I wanted to do after school.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rehost.diberie.com&#x2F;Uploads&#x2F;37&#x2F;20210215-160435-948cd786-2d0c-4641-b56c-00104e53a167.37.res.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rehost.diberie.com&#x2F;Uploads&#x2F;37&#x2F;20210215-160435-948cd7...</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rehost.diberie.com&#x2F;Uploads&#x2F;37&#x2F;20210215-160351-cc03e033-b5c0-4c7c-85bb-2d0f7a8b300f.37.res.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rehost.diberie.com&#x2F;Uploads&#x2F;37&#x2F;20210215-160351-cc03e0...</a> [3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rehost.diberie.com&#x2F;Uploads&#x2F;37&#x2F;20210215-160401-712b1fa8-88a7-4e3b-9ae3-b6873cf55694.37.res.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rehost.diberie.com&#x2F;Uploads&#x2F;37&#x2F;20210215-160401-712b1f...</a> [4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rehost.diberie.com&#x2F;Uploads&#x2F;37&#x2F;20210215-160338-6f856cae-afa9-4e13-8084-c00ab633942b.37.res.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rehost.diberie.com&#x2F;Uploads&#x2F;37&#x2F;20210215-160338-6f856c...</a> &amp;&amp; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rehost.diberie.com&#x2F;Uploads&#x2F;37&#x2F;20210215-160330-cc512a98-cb8b-4532-a089-6761344cf58f.37.res.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rehost.diberie.com&#x2F;Uploads&#x2F;37&#x2F;20210215-160330-cc512a...</a>

Tried Delphi a million years ago. Was too in love with Visual Basic 3.0. Couldn&#x27;t do it.

Is it me or do those Windows 3.1 screenshots look much more readable than the modern ones?

It’s a pity the language is ugly and the price is sky high. It’s otherwise a fantastic way of rapidly building native Windows apps. It would be amazing with a language something like Swift.

Whatever happened to Power Builder?

Delphi is as old as Python, damn.