Delphi, the perpetual underdog of IT....

[The Gorn]

Are any newsgroups still active?

I have no idea where one would find Delphi developers.

[RichK]

Strangely enough - I have never even heard about some company converting a Delphi app to Java or .NET.  
 
  Maybe Delphi is so awesome - using anything else will be a downgrade  
 
  Last year I worked with one IDE this year is a different one - I am sure next year will be another one ...

Delphi is and always will be an "advanced" development tool. It's not a coder's tool. It's for software developers that want to eliminate the mundane coding tasks of development. I can take designs and make them software with very little coding, very little.

The reason you change IDEs is because they are built around a language and new languages pop-up by the dozen overnight. A visual IDE is built around a development paradigm and can host many different languages. So, once someone gets used to a visual IDE they don't need to switch unless the IDE doesn't support today's "buzz word language".

[RichK]

It just occurred to me that businesses that committed to Delphi for their products or internal systems, most likely had the reciprocal problem: a very   shallow local pool of talent and not much available nationally, either. If I had problems finding work, then my would-be and unknown clients probably had an   equally tough time finding reasonable talent to maintain their products and carry them forward. Kind of the opposite of a platform like C++, Java or VB where   the problem is whittling down an large field of applicants.  
 
  Business wise they are usually, tightfisted and abusive, tending toward dishonest and scheming; with know-nothing owners calling the shots.  
 
  It seems to me that adoption of Delphi probably constrained the growth of many of these places.  
 
  In other words, Delphi, although a brilliant tool, also tends to be the IDE of shithole, loser, incompetently run, cash poor, crap companies.

Finding local Delphi talent has always been a problem. Programmers move up to Delphi they don't enter the field using Delphi. They learn "coding" at the university, it's important to learn the basics. Dropping one component on a form in Delphi can be like writing 100 LOC. A Delphi developer needs to understand the code they just dropped onto that form, but there's no reason to write it again. Also, object oriented development wasn't taught in schools when pascal was the choosen teaching language. Kids coming out of college today have been exposed to Java and C.

As fas as know nothing owners goes. People off the street think that because they can write a formula in a spreadsheet they're a programmer. Technically that's correct, but in reality its way off.

Delphi would constrain the growth of an hourly rate shop because the idea behind Delphi is rapid application development. However, for shops selling products, Delphi is a great way to "test the idea" by putting an app together quickly then adding features "if" the product makes money. MS does the exact thing with every product they make. Get it to market quickly and fix it as the money rolls in or drop it.

Right cash poor companies gravitate to Delphi because of it's ability to built "version 1" quickly. Analysis results for building the app in a "I'm a typer you're a typer we all typers" IDE shows the costs to be a barrier to success for some new products.

[RichK]

Techies (programmers) are very sensitive to the technology platform that they will be using on a job. These jobs are   not generic. The language and the tools will place a long lasting imprint upon the developer.  
 
  So suppose such an outfit were to locate a good (qualitatively) person who could help them, but who wasn't into   Delphi at the time? That person would have to assess their career interests in spending the next 2-5 years in   bed with Delphi.  
 
  My bet is that most talented developers presented with such a choice would not take it. "Learning Delphi   as a job benefit" isn't exactly a benefit, it's really a nail in the career coffin.  
 
  The only developers who would take such a job would probably do so out of desperation. And why are such   people desperate? You have to ask that.

First you must decide if you want a life working 50 hours per week then after 30 years you find the CEO stole your pension. If so, follow the latest and greatest, filling your resume with all the buzzwords. Today and into the future programmers are labor, lower middle class labor! And that's OK for some.

But, if you want to be successful you can't follow the crowd, you have to go where the other guys aren't. I'm not saying go to Delphi or VS or any other IDE. I'm saying you're right about what happened with Delphi, but if you're gonna' be part of the success of a product not just hired hands. Then you'll pick the IDE that gets the product done quickly so that you can test the market.

VS became what Delphi was many versions ago. VS will catch up to Delphi in the near future. The Delphi paradigm is the future for successful developers, not laborers... developers. It doesn't matter if they use VS or Delphi the visual RAD approach will win. Why pay someone to re-code sorting and searching algorithms that have been coded a thousand times before when you can drop a component that does the sorting, the searching, and more?

The small companies you're describing failed because the market didn't take to their product. If it had they would have switch to any IDE needed to keep making money. The reason you're sore is you were labor and didn't end up with a lasting job. While the entrepreneurs of those companies probably bagged a chunk of change in the very beginning. But entrepreneurs don't reinvest, they grap their chunk as soon as possible and keep going only if they can find "other people's money" to use.

[RichK]

Delphi was basically "Turbo Pascal for Windows". With most of the same competitive advantages over the field   of competitor Windows development tools of the time that TP offered over the tools of the mid 1980s. IE, it offered a clear way of doing things, extremely   high speed of development, and flexibility.

The upper management at the company that owned Delphi (there were so many different company names I won't even bother to mention any) started to use the Delphi profits to develop ALM (application lifecycle management) tools. Delphi shops noticed this and began to move to tools that were actively being improved. Delphi was the cash cow and it was slaughtered. However, Embarcadero is putting much effort into renewing Delphi.

[RichK]

Delphi was never that great on the web or as a client/server development platform. It was pretty much a GUI/workstation thing. So, in a sense, the   development world has passed Delphi by.  
 
  But what I would consider to be something that gives the same kinds of strategic advantages to today's programmers with today's problems (web   development) would probably be something like RoR, or Python.  
 
  .Net is often mentioned as the "logical successor" to Delphi because the architect behind Delphi was hired by MS to design C#. I do not agree with   this thinking at all. Why - some of the qualities that distinguished Delphi were simplicity, speed, and straightforward, transparent architecture. .Net is   simply too complex to be considered a philosophic inheritor of Delphi's "legacy". All it does is borrow (steal) the component oriented   philosophy.

Delphi wasn't ever real good for web apps. But, it was created for client/server database systems.

Yes, RoR or Python are being used more and more. But, if you want to keep your resume up to date .NET is the way to go.

MS is improving VS/C# all the time, but yes it's not the "powerful Delphi".

[RichK]

Thanks for posting.  
 
  I hope it was clear that I was venting out of extreme frustration.

Thx. No problem, I've been through bunches Delphi related bashing over the years. Some from frustration, some from true stupid problems coming from Delphi. Delphi is not perfect!

[RichK]

Are any newsgroups still active?  
 
  I have no idea where one would find Delphi developers.

forums.codegear.com

[The Gorn]

Are any of the public Delphi newsgroups used any more, like borland.public.delphi.* ? Or is all the message activity under the Codegear corporate umbrella now?

I mean, I just did this search: http://groups.google.com/...G=Search&sitesearch= and it shows the latest posting to *any* newsgroup under that hierarchy being July 2008. (!)

I had my resume posted to delphipages.com and it appears that that place is a ghetto. I wanted to remove my resume and the web site's CGI or scripts wouldn't let me make changes and returned irrelevant errors. So I kept posting complaints to the internal message board there and finally someone noticed it and removed my resume.

[RichK]

Are any of the public Delphi newsgroups used any more, like borland.public.delphi.* ? Or is all the message   activity under the Codegear corporate umbrella now?

I don't know if google or anyone archives the Delphi NGs anymore or not. You'll probably need to go directly to the CodeGear site.