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Borland Announces the Return of the Turbo Products, with Video
Leonel writes "Borland Software's Developer Tools Group just announced the return of the Turbo line of products. With free and cheap versions, it's aimed at students, hobbyist developers, occupational developers and individual programming professionals. More information is available at the the Turbo Explorer website, including a video of the Adventures of TurboMan."
Do these still need two 5.25" floppy drives to run? I'm not sure I remember where mine are.
TurboProducts return!
With 80% more standards non-compliance.
Interesting that the Borland tools are being released close to the end of the free year of MS's Express line (ending in Nov. I believe). Could Borland be preparing to take on the MS developer tool chain again?
/.) tool chain. It'll be fun to see if Borland can bring anything new and unique to compete with the VS Express Editions.
Considering that Visual Studio is a highly evolved (I know, this is ALWAYS open for debate on
I would imagine that Borland hopes to boost sales of its higher end lines by giving away the cheap ones and hooking the developers, but they'd better have some super-sweet bait on the end of the hook. There are tons of powerful IDE's, many free. Unless they bring something to the table that is lacking in other products, I can't see them reaching their business objectives.
People are beginning to expect the IDE to be free. Oracle knows this, so does Sun.
Best of luck to Borland. I have fond memories all the way back to Borland C++ 3.x for Windows, and Delphi - ESPECIALLY Delphi.
Delphi ain't your father's Pascal. It's a modern, object-oriented interoperable language. The main advantage isn't the language itself, but the class library (VCL) and the form designer, which is the best tool around to build user interfaces (ask Skype), while still having the ability of having your code neatly encapsulated in classes separated from the presentation layer.
.Net offerings. if that's your language of choice, you can use C++ with the VCL (or for plain WinAPI applications, if you feel inclined).
Anyway, Delphi is only half of the picture here. There's Turbo C++ and C# offerings along with the native Delphi and Delphi for
Basically, the explorer versions are advanced IDEs for these languages, free of change, allowing commercial development. There's your motivation.
Free things are ALWAYS good :)
Did you live in Troy in a previous life?
Borland was EXTREMELY popular back in the day. They could have OWNED the dev tools space completely. At some point they got too carried away with MBA-related activities, such as branding, enterprise fads du jour, etc and they lost their userbase and fucked up their products. I have used Delphi and C++ Builder extensively. 6-7 years back there was NO decent RAD alternative. The best thing about them was you could drop all the way to the bare metal at any time if you wanted to and you could have RAD capabilities if you needed to deliver stuff quickly.
I feel for Borland, but at this point I think they should fold up their tent and die. They're beyond any hope of recovery, thanks to retarded management and marketing.
Your motivation? How is productivity as a motivation?
Delphi has been my tool of choice for the last 11 years. It remains the
most productive development tool I have used.
Agile processes? Well, the build on a Delphi project is so quick, you
don't have time to fill your coffee cup, much less drink it. So build/test
cycles are fast.
The language is powerful, and a great foundation for those who choose to
move to C#. The learning curve on C#, coming from Delphi, is pretty shallow.
But please, stay with your g++, and those glacially slow builds. I don't
need more competition.
--- Bill
No, they're not bringing back Turbo Pascal. They're just rebranding Delphi and Delphi-based products as "Turbo".
Hearken, ye, to a Borland survior. (I wrote a good chunk of the API documentation in Delphi, C++Builder, and Kylix.) Borland somehow has always been run by people who know jack about managing other people. They can't implement the most basic corporate policies, like making people work on the stuff they were actually assigned to work on. So they fall back on Stupid Executive Tricks that they picked up at some seminar somewhere. When I was there, management was in love with "lifecycle management" tools, and actually acquired two vendors of them, neither of which actually had a usable product. But most often, the SET consists of simple-minded rebranding. Usually, it's just pointless, like bringing back "Turbo". But sometimes, they really screw up, like when they renamed the company "Inprise".
Hate to say it, but Borland's pretty much irrelevent. Their last serious achievement was Kylix, which took too long to get out the door, and which targeted a market (Linux desktop developers) that turned out to be nonexistant. And that was 5 years ago! Since then, most of their key people have moved on, and their tools group has stagnated. The fact that management thinks they can sell it just shows how clueless they are.
Delphi is still my favorite development environment. Or rather it would be, if I could bear to use it. Which I can't — it's just too depressing.