Thoughts about Delphi?

Marc Clifton

I've been meaning to ask this, and the weekly survey reminded me about it. What are your thoughts about Delphi with regards to other languages? Yeah, I know--the right tool for the job. What I mean is, from what I've seen, today's Delphi reminds me of Cobol--a lot of people are doing Delphi because they're maintaining legacy systems. So I'm curious--if you're using Delphi, is it because of legacy code or did you/the team/the management actively (consciously?) choose Delphi for a new project? If so, why? Existing expertise? Easier to use? Marc

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Daniel Turini

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Lost User

Marc, there was a time when Borland products ruled supreme. And the concept of Delphi was in direct competition with an early VB and was most successful for a variety of reasons including the ability to create DLLs and you could use it either in a procedural manner or in an Object Oriented manner so you had the best of both worlds, and it was powerful but easy to use. And teachers loved it because it forces students to learn and to program in the right way. Borland lost its way with Delphi and C++ Builder and is sadly dying even though Borland has recently launched new versions. Wonder who the (yet to be announced) new owners of these Borland products are going to do with them ????

Chris Buckett

We used to use delphi for everything. But at about the same time VS2005 came out in beta, Borland was (well, we were) having major performance problems with Delphi 2005. Coupled with the fact that .net 2 was out, and Delphi didn't support it, we decided for new projects to go down the .net / vs2005 route. I still use delphi for maintenance of the old apps, but I use delphi version 7 (the last great delphi ide before they went to the BDS ide, IMO). At it's time, Delphi vs VB, I was firmly in the Delphi camp. But nowadays I'm microsoft & c# all the way. 1. Most of the examples are in c# rather than pascal. 2. The latest technologies are implemented in VS, as far as I know, Delphi still only supports .net 1.1 (but it may have moved on since I last looked). 3. VS2005 + Coderush + TestRunner make for a great Ide. I found the transition to C# from 10+ years programming in pascal (with a tiny bit of exposure to c/c++) to be very easy indeed. ChrisB.

Johan Pretorius

When ever i think of delphi i think back to the days I did Turbo Pascal in school. I must say that personally i think delphi & turbo pascal is great languages to start programming in and i know of a company that uses delphi for writing BI components. But it has seen better days and that c# will kill it in a matter of time. If you are looking to create a new project or create a code base it wise to go with another language. Giving you a recommendation to what is better ... well ... will be wrong as im still inlove with c++ ;P

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Pete OHanlon

Well - I've not used Delphi since version 3, so apologies to all the Delphi fans out there if I'm out of date here. Delphi was a great language, well designed and easy to use. Unfortunately it seemed to stagnate. MS has made great leaps forward from VB6/VC6 to .NET and has put a lot of effort (including hiring Anders Hjelberg from Borland) into the infrastructure and languages that we are going to use. Borland unfortunately, seems to have got stuck a bit in the way that it integrates with other systems by insisting on inventing its own way of doing things (VCL, BDE, etc). That said - the issue is not so much about the syntax of the language, but rather is about how easily it helps you to accomplish the task before you. I'm a big fan of C#, but if Delphi was to offer me an easier way to write business sytems, then I would go for it.

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Kevin McFarlane

Chris Buckett wrote:

I found the transition to C# from 10+ years programming in pascal

Especially as C# is heavily influenced by Delphi.

Kevin

Chris Buckett

As I heard it Microsoft poached the guy who turned turbo pascal into Delphi (can't remember his name, though). I do occasionally find similarities that can't be there by coincidence. ChrisB

Clickok

Hi Marc I'm using Delphi since v3 days. Until Delphi7 (Win32) Delphi was one great platform, really years in the front of Visual Studio. Then MS launched .Net and Borland is a few dizzy. They launched Win32 and .Net versions of Delphi. Now, the development team is separating of the ALM (application lifetime management) team, and one of the first initiatives was launch Turbo Explorer[^] versions. The only problem is what is for .Net 1.1 (a great flaw, just when MS announced .Net 3.0). But if you wish try Delphi development, no will found "Cobol problems". Do you will can create anything what C# and VB.Net can do, and the Borland IDE is very nice too (but a few bug too). Personally, I like very much of Delphi. If the Borland pay more attention to language and support new .Net features, I really can work Delphi and C# side-by-side. Regards PS Good reference, David Intersimone "David I"[^] blog -- modified at 8:27 Tuesday 31st October, 2006

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Roland Pibinger

Chris Buckett wrote:

As I heard it Microsoft poached the guy who turned turbo pascal into Delphi (can't remember his name, though).

Anders Hejlsberg[^]

Rohde

OT: Yeah Delphi is becoming a bit old-school. But I'd like to recommend Chrome[^], an Object-Pascal language (inspired by Deplhi) for .NET. It has some very nice features - for example it's design-by-contract features.

J Dunlap

Marc Clifton wrote:

What are your thoughts about Delphi with regards to other languages?

It was arguably the best thing out there for business apps for a bit there, but it doesn't seem to me to offer anything above the .NET platform at this point. It's gone stagnant - no significant innovation even in the .NET-based versions. C# is going the direction I want to go, for the most part.

darkelv

Delphi 5 = Curses whenever I need to maintain a legacy system. Not because of the language, just due to the original designer had made the system as difficult to maintain as humanly possible. Just want to vent. :doh:

Lost User

We have a lot of Delphi desktop apps but everything new is c#. I find the IDE a real pain and nothing will make me run for the hills like the prospect of debugging some of this code.