The IDE is just so far behind the competition. Crashing all the time an slow. Theming support ist very limited (to date). Delphi Code Insight ("Intellisense") is slow and sometimes just refuses to work and is generally not on par with other offerings. Error Insight (the wiggly red lines thing) is even worse.
Delphi still uses a single pass compiler which makes for great compilation speed but seriously limits the language constructs.
The pricing is just out of this wolrd. You get the impression that they try to squeeze every last penny out of their existing user base.
People always say one of the main advantages of Delphi is programming of database centric (CRUD) applications but compared to the SAP system it's still inferior. I think the principle of RAD itself may be flawed/dangerous. Sure, for small CRUD Apps with a single window operating directly with the db components (Grid, and those "mapped" Fields) you will quickly have results and it will work. But for larger Applications that all falls apart.
The trouble I see for Delphi is that the whole eco system is rotten. In my perception there are only a hand full suppliers of components and libraries left. Some of those components are barely maintained and even worse documented. There is lots more knowledge and up-to-date examples available for C#.
> The pricing is just out of this wolrd. You get the impression that they try to squeeze every last penny out of their existing user base.
I used to think that about Delphi, various commercial Lisp implementations, etc. But after some time I've changed my view a little.
My change is because I realized that Delphi had its chance, and kept on trying as the chance slipped away. No amount of competitive pricing today is going to make a resurgence of Delphi happen. That door is closed, for all practical purposes.
The alternative is to offer products and support in a sustainable way and given the small number of people using Delphi professionally today, that means charging somewhat hefty amounts. IOW, their target market is business that has Delphi products that are worthwhile to maintain. In order to stay in business and provide service they have shed casual users.
(As much as we can debate about Tiobe and other indexs, is important to note that is still way higher that many will expect, and the flow of information we see in the community is very good, much more than many other hispers options)
The thing is that price is in fact the main problem. This kill the open source ecosystem options around it.
I will totally, like many others (I know, I'm moderator in on of the most important forum in Latin-America) work more for it but without a way to reach a large audience it kill many ideas we have.
Delphi was the most sucesfully opensource but commercial (as, you have the source) with many thirdy-party options. Think like the current React-Components market but maybe larger and years ago.
I think any company that would buy Delphi will agree more with me than with you.
If you're right and companies just can't see that or make it work, can the community do more with Lazarus? I have not played with that so I don't know how good it is.
In the height of the enterprise transformation, I asked Del Yocam, one of many interim CEOs after Kahn, "Are you saying you want to trade a million loyal $100 customers for a hundred $1 million customers?" Yocam replied without hesitation "Absolutely."
This is it. Management trade a large and healthy ecosystem chasing the rainbows.
This will fail for sure.
---
Lazarus is ok, except that suffer from the same disease of most open source projects: Lack of focus and good funding.
Look at every other Delphi competitor from the time period. Microsoft is giving Visual Studio away to casual users and Visual Basic is now VB.Net. Eclipse and IntelliJ come in free versions. There is no longer a market for a million loyal $100 customers for a programming language and ecosystem. There are too many high-quality free languages, compilers and IDEs to make that business model work anymore.
There's a sort of a hobbyist/professional split. There's a lot of grey area inbetween, but it's easier to reason about it if you think of two markets. One will pay, one won't if there are acceptable free alternatives. But it turns out that there are rather big synergies to be had from both camps using versions of the same tooling. So you have enterprises that are willing to buy pro versions of tools at prices that subsidize the existence of users at the free tier. That's nothing like the old Borland model that the post I was responding to wants Delphi to go back to.
I came to Unix at that time with Delphi fresh in my mind (Delphi 1/2 IIRC ) and the only thing that showed anywhere near similar promise was Qt, though it took a long time for it to get similar features in both the object model (properties etc) and the UI builder.
One of the many things I loved about Delphi compared to other RAD tools of the time was that it was the only one that supported and encouraged modular separation of logic and UI. In most others (VB!), the IDE did nothing to help you, and most people ended up with all their logic mixed into the UI code, simply because the UI code was the focus of the whole IDE.
I learned to program using Borland Turbo C for DOS, but my first GUI applications were built with Delphi 2.0, which was the first 32-bit version. I earned my first money ever selling a shareware application I built with Delphi, before reaching puberty yet!
The Windows platform was awful so I ran away to Unix, and trying to find something even close to Delphi was just impossible. The best thing we had was Tcl/Tk, which I used a fair bit.
I tried Java at the time and remember saying to myself: You got to be kidding me.
Eventually I gave up on GUI development for Unix and embraced the web browser is the UI philosophy and develop the back-end in Python (then a fairly new language). Best career move I ever made.
> The IDE is just so far behind the competition. Crashing all the time an slow. Theming support ist very limited (to date). Delphi Code Insight ("Intellisense") is slow and sometimes just refuses to work and is generally not on par with other offerings
I'm 100% with you. That's why I switched from Delphi IDE to Visual Studio Code with OmniPascal (www.omnipascal.com). It's much nicer to work in a state-of-the-art editor.
And even with $10 million, SAP has a plain ugly UI - ASCII based controls from the 1980s coded with a COBOL inspired script language also from the 1980s.
Yeah true. I copied part of my comment from another comment I did regarding Delphi. So this mention of SAP lacks context. None the less Delphi is lauded for the speed and convenience with which you can create database applications but but compared with a language that was designed especially for it is not that great and Delphi's abstractions you have to use to "do it the Delphi way" and get the outlined advandtages just fall apart in more complex scenarios and begin standin in your way or are straight anti patterns.
The pricing is just out of this wolrd. You get the impression that they try to squeeze every last penny out of their existing user base.
People always say one of the main advantages of Delphi is programming of database centric (CRUD) applications but compared to the SAP system it's still inferior. I think the principle of RAD itself may be flawed/dangerous. Sure, for small CRUD Apps with a single window operating directly with the db components (Grid, and those "mapped" Fields) you will quickly have results and it will work. But for larger Applications that all falls apart.
The trouble I see for Delphi is that the whole eco system is rotten. In my perception there are only a hand full suppliers of components and libraries left. Some of those components are barely maintained and even worse documented. There is lots more knowledge and up-to-date examples available for C#.