It's both nostalgic and amusing to see comparisons between Delphi and C#, as both are emits from the brilliant mind of Anders Hejlsberg. Anders and co. at Borland International ran rings around Microsoft products, performance- and ANSI compliance-wise, for many years. Microsoft ultimately poached a lot of talent from Borland, including Anders, which got them in some trouble, you might recall! My observations (I'm an Old Programmer): As in other parts of the industry, Microsoft started relatively slow, then ultimately took over the market, not by delivering surpassing quality, but by gathering maximum mindshare and buying out competitors. Remember the old saying "Nobody ever lost their job because they bought IBM"? In software development that eventually became true of Microsoft. To their credit, Microsoft eventually produced great software development tools (thanks to both home-grown and imported talent, I believe), but they started out way behind Borland in the C++ space, and never really competed in the Turbo Pascal / Delphi space, especially if you wanted to produce self-contained .EXEs free of endless dependencies. That's why they had to get Anders Hejlsberg on staff! Our shop uses all of the above, including RAD Studio, which includes C++ Builder (still my hands-down favorite for Windows development) and Delphi. And of course we also use Visual Studio, mostly for C#, but for other reasons, too. I don't know about the jobs market, but again, given Microsoft's mindshare stronghold, it's not surprising that excellent products like Delphi are relegated to the "also ran" category. Now in Embarcadero's catalog, it's still an excellent development environment and language, and still has the fastest compiler I've ever used (Delphi has always been magical-fast thanks to Anders' phenomenal talent for efficient design). Borland was so fanatical about the quality of the product that at one point they started developing the Delphi IDE in Delphi, one of the first times I encountered -- and immediately saw the wisdom of -- "dog fooding" it.

Quote:

as we age, our memory and cognitive function declines.

Relative to our own prior state. Relative to the rest of the software development team? Meaningless. I was WAAAAAAAAAAY smarter and more productive than you when I was 25. Now I'm just WAAAAAY smarter and more productive. ;)

In my "non-productive" (read "non-coding!") time I write parodies (Weird Al is my hero!) Why this one didn't occur to me years ago, I do not know. Recently it came to me as I needed to write something for a team lunch, and today I decided to start working up a home recording of it. Dedicated to my code geek colleagues -- and their mothers! Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Coders Hope you enjoy a little fun on this 4th of July.

_______________________ Keith Chuvala Friendswood, Texas USA