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Delphi Turns 10
NavySpy writes "Today is Delphi's Tenth Birthday! The launch of Delphi 1.0 occurred on February 14th, 1995 at the Software Development '95 conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Numerous links are commemorating the event, including a recorded interview with Zach Urlocker and Gary Whizin, members of the original management team. Zack's original Product Definintion document is here. An attendee at the original event reminisces about the launch."
The combination lets developers whip up full-featured GUI apps in minutes. This concept was hyped as "RAD" -- rapid application development: Create a new form. Put a tabular editor widget on it. Put a data source component on it. Hook the table widget visually to the data source. Now you have a table containing your database's data.
Delphi later wooed COM/DCOM and CORBA, and added these two systems as first-class citizens in the language, similar to RMI or Distributed Ruby -- suddenly it was a snap to write an app whose objects lived in a separate process or on a remote machine. It was part of an ill-fated strategy to capture the "middleware" market.
Borland's Java product, JBuilder, tried to be "Delphi for Java", but failed to live up to the "just works"-quality of its parent product. Even later, Delphi has gone after .NET, but I stopped paying attention long before that.
Delphi could have been big. It was a masterpiece in engineering. Sadly, Borland shot themselves in the foot in several ways:
Part of Borland's fall from grace may be blamed on greed -- greed and the dot-com era. They were originally a development tools company. But even after the Philippe Kahn-era attempt to compete with Microsoft (Quattro Pro, etc.) failed, the execs made a similar mistake by going after the gold mine that is the enterprise consultancy business.
They renamed their company Inprise, touted a bunch of half-assed products, and drowned their web site and communication in buzzwords about enterprise middleware, B2B, application servers and other stuff that were the obvious product of executives, not visionary engineers. They were not just a product company any more, but now also a "solutions" company. And rather than going after common-sense technologies, they went where the hype was. Their new products were also not up to the quality that customers knew and loved from previous products. In the end, they had the arrogance suited for the business, but not the savvy. So they failed.
Borland have refocused in recent years, and the effort is commendable, but they have not regained their former reputation. For one, I don't know anyone who uses Delphi anymore.
Perhaps most sign
You could see that same attitude in the Usenet groups they hosted, which were frequented by their hard-core users almost religiously. They claimed to listen to their customers, but if any of these users gave them any suggestions on how to improve things and push Delphi more mainstream, they would just brush them off as being non-typical hard-core users and not representative of their targetted audience (John Kaster comes to mind). Which brings us to their insane Inprise days, when they thought they could me more Microsoft than Bill Gates, and any non-corporate entity (i.e. end-user programmers rather than purchasing managers or whatever) wasn't worth listening to.
.NET) is getting quite good also, though it still has some large gaping holes, and Delphi was there already long, long ago.
Yeah, I'm bitter about all that because they prevented Delphi from being a real contender, and forced legions of loyal users to defect to gag-inducing VB to keep making a living. Borland once used to be a real name in compilers, and you didn't have to make an excuse for using TP or BC++, until about the late 90s. Nowadays it's hard to find a company that even has Borland products on their approved list.
Incidentally, I loved the Delphi help file. It was a very well structured and exhaustive documentation of the IDE and particularly the VCL, with only the odd missing or wrong link. I must say that the MSDN library (particularly since
Also, I consider Java to be an academic/learning language (and I think most universities today would agree), designed to demonstrate (and steer one into) OOP and its benefits, without the potential frustration and turn-off of getting hung up on details like pointers and freeing (some) resources, or from crashing the machine. And yet it's certainly very successful. But it too may dwindle in popularity at some point, and be superceded by The Next Big Thing.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
Delphi was a great language for building windows applications. It's VCL managed to abstract out most of the windows hideousness, enough so that beginners had to learn *nothing* about all of that to make quite good looking, and well behaved applications. If you became more expert, it didn't get in your way either. I stuck with Borland products for years, from Turbo Pascal onwards. Their early products were fast, well structured, high quality beasts that were leaders in their day. The developer community was fantastic.
But Borland, the company, what can I say. And let's just agree to politely ignore the "Inprise" episode. Over many years I reported several critical bugs in the VCL and IDE using their bug reporting tools, with fixes and workarounds provided, and nothing was done - over several product releases. In my last role, we switched from Delphi to C++ Builder, and that did it for me. Buggy, unstable and zero support, even for critical compiler and linker bugs that prevented us from building our applications for weeks at a time.
I feel like a valued friend developed Alzheimers. I still miss the old Borland...