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."

Comments

Ahead of its time, etc.

[Earlybird]

I don't expect too many Slashdotters know about Delphi because of its Windows origins. Delphi comprises:

• A Java-like OO dialect of Pascal.
• A native compiler for this language.
• An elegant Qt-like component toolkit, comprising both UI widgets and non-visual components such as databases.
• An elegant set of GUI design tools for this toolkit.
• An IDE with an integrated interactive debugger.

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:

• They treated their users like crap.
• They focused on the wrong technologies, not the stuff that made Delphi good.
• They were incredibly slow in going after open source.
• They handled the open source move badly. When they finally released the InterBase source, they almost immediately changed their minds and went back to making it proprietary again. The open-source version, Firebird, survives, but is no longer aided by Borland in the way that was originaly planned.
• They let their star visionary/engineer, Anders Hejlsberg, be stolen away by Microsoft along with a handful of other core employees.
• They annihilated their once-great quality assurance. Delphi 3 and 4 were beta-quality software.
• They had a brilliant C++ version of Delphi, but it was treated as the idiot inbred cousin, lagging behind in features and being saddled with yet another crummy proprietary, incompatible dialect of C++.
• They spent a lot of effort on Linux, with the Kylix product, which to my knowledge has never taken off.
• They did not evolve the language. For example, it was hard to interface with C APIs. (I wrote a rather successful C/C++ translator called htrans that helped me write the wrappers needed to interface with tech such as TAPI, MAPI and various other COM libs; it was the only way.)

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