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Programming IT Technology

Delphi Turns 10 65

Posted by timothy from the oracular dept.
NavySpy writes "Today is Delphi's Tenth Birthday! The launch of Delphi 1.0 occurred on February 14th, 1995 at the Software Development '95 conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Numerous links are commemorating the event, including a recorded interview with Zach Urlocker and Gary Whizin, members of the original management team. Zack's original Product Definintion document is here. An attendee at the original event reminisces about the launch."
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Delphi Turns 10 More

Delphi Turns 10

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  • In 1996 or 1997 I tried to learn Delphi to add more to my resume. Correct me if I am wrong... but this language just wasn't freely downloadable like java or perl. As a result, this language never became super popular.

    • Re:Wasn't Free (Score:4, Informative)

      by bentfork ( 92199 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @05:47PM (#11672746)
      They tried to do the linux thing a couple years back. Something called kylix. Sadly no one seems to know about the free ( as in, you use it you give your stuff away free ) Borland® Kylix(TM) 3 Open Edition [borland.com] (their name, not mine).

      I haven't done any delphi work in a couple years, and have never heard anyone talking about kylix. Anyone have any experience with it?

      • Re:Wasn't Free (Score:4, Informative)

        by Pig Hogger ( 10379 ) <pig DOT hogger AT gmail DOT com> on Monday February 14, 2005 @06:41PM (#11673182) Journal
        I've worked full-time some 5 years with Delphi (and since then once in a while), so when Kylix showed-up I was necessarly interested, so I downloaded the whole shebang.

        Unfortunately, Kylix sucks as much as Delphi rocks; the code is not stable, as it reportedly uses WINE to run. And the basic "free" Kylix version is practically crippled as it does not includes the database components.

      • Though I have no experience with it myself I know that xpde [xpde.com], a desktop environment for Linux that mimics Windows XP, is being written with Kylix. According to the xpde FAQ, the project can be compiled with Kylix Open Edition. So at least some people are still getting use out of it.
    • + it was an academic language designed to demonstrate the benefits of structured programming. Academic languages are never very successful. See smalltalk, logo & fortran as examples.

      • Re:Wasn't Free (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Bill Dog ( 726542 )
        Don't confuse successful with having a finite popular lifetime. Someone ought to be able to correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd heard that at one time Pascal was the major development language at Microsoft, in its time. And I think Fortran was extremely popular in its day.

        Also, I consider Java to be an academic/learning language (and I think most universities today would agree), designed to demonstrate (and steer one into) OOP and its benefits, without the potential frustration and turn-off of getting hung up

    • There was a decent free stipped down version 6 available (although you had register to use it). Good luck tracking it down though, it was a couple of versions ago..

  • Alas Delphi (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @05:43PM (#11672713) Homepage Journal
    I worked on the Delphi API documentation from 2000 to 2002. (If you want to pick a nit, I actually spent more time working on C++Builder and Kylix. But those products are just the C++ and Linux manifestations of Delphi.) A good chunk of the current docs for the object hierarchy under TComponent is my work. I spent a lot of time staring at Delphi (AKA Object Pascal) source code, and I really came to appreciate the language's ability to describe powerful objects with simple code. And how easy it is to create really good software even if you're not a gifted programmer. Which pretty much describes me.

    Alas, my experience at Borland left me with a total aversion to the whole scene. It wasn't just that Borland is badly managed, or that everybody who works there seems to have a bad case of "I know what I'm doing, the rest of you can fuck off." It's how great Borland could be if they just developed a general sense of teamwork. There isn't an IDE on the planet that could compete it, if it were just a little more user friendly, a lot better documented, and sanely marketed.

    Nowadays I find it unbearably depressing to even fire up my copy of Delphi. I've been boning up on Java...

    • Re:Alas Delphi (Score:5, Insightful)

      by uradu ( 10768 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @09:52PM (#11674523)
      You could see that same attitude in the Usenet groups they hosted, which were frequented by their hard-core users almost religiously. They claimed to listen to their customers, but if any of these users gave them any suggestions on how to improve things and push Delphi more mainstream, they would just brush them off as being non-typical hard-core users and not representative of their targetted audience (John Kaster comes to mind). Which brings us to their insane Inprise days, when they thought they could me more Microsoft than Bill Gates, and any non-corporate entity (i.e. end-user programmers rather than purchasing managers or whatever) wasn't worth listening to.

      Yeah, I'm bitter about all that because they prevented Delphi from being a real contender, and forced legions of loyal users to defect to gag-inducing VB to keep making a living. Borland once used to be a real name in compilers, and you didn't have to make an excuse for using TP or BC++, until about the late 90s. Nowadays it's hard to find a company that even has Borland products on their approved list.

      Incidentally, I loved the Delphi help file. It was a very well structured and exhaustive documentation of the IDE and particularly the VCL, with only the odd missing or wrong link. I must say that the MSDN library (particularly since .NET) is getting quite good also, though it still has some large gaping holes, and Delphi was there already long, long ago.
      • Yeah, that "Topic search" right-click is a godsend for understanding the behavior of Pascal and the Delphi objects. Anything not answered there, then the newsfroups are your friend (props to the TeamB guys!).
      • Yes, that attitude is still prevalent in the newsgroups they run. Make a suggestion: get shot down in flames until someone inside Borland suggests it, and then the attitudes change such that you'd think the person inside Borland came down from the mountain with the idea engraved in stone.

        It's really sad.

        And speaking of Kaster, give QualityCentral [borland.com] a look some time. Here's a place where, supposedly, you can make suggestions and get your peers to vote on them and have them taken seriously. And yet when your
        • I still think that Delphi is more than a match for the current .NET languages and framework, and shines well above .NET in actually writing to the metal. But I don't know how many visionaries Borland has left, and I can take a good guess at what things will look like in another 2-3 years.

  • Good old Frank (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Do you think Frank Borland [borland.com] is celebrating somewhere in the mountains? :)

  • Oh the memories (Score:3, Funny)

    by Leroy_Brown242 ( 683141 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @06:07PM (#11672919) Homepage Journal
    Delphi is the one and only language I wrote something in, for Windows. IIRC, I wrote a simple text editor.

    Then, I decided programming wasn't my thing, and moved on to OS whoring.

    Oh, the good ol' days . . .

    • Sorry to sound unappreciative but a Delphi text editor? That took you, what, 15 minutes?

      Pretty decisive :-)

      (Miss Delphi terribly, now write ASP with VBScript, miss Pascal very regularly and periodically drop into it by mistake ;-)
  • Ok, color me ignorant, but, is there an opensource delphi compiler
    available ?
    • Just like there is an open-source Windows...

    • Re:OSS Compiler ? (Score:5, Informative)

      by xoboots ( 683791 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @09:22PM (#11674364) Journal
      Sort of -- there is the cross-platform Free Pascal:

      http://www.freepascal.org/ [freepascal.org]

      "The language syntax is semantically compatible with TP 7.0 as well as most versions of Delphi (classes, rtti, exceptions, ansistrings, widestrings, interfaces). Furthermore Free Pascal supports function overloading, operator overloading, global properties and other such features."

      There is an associated project that aims to duplicate the VCL called FCL:

      http://www.freepascal.org/fcl/fcl.html [freepascal.org]

      Finally, there is the related Delphi-like IDE to go with it:

      http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/ [freepascal.org]

      It's actually quite good.

    • check out Lazarus [freepascal.org]. It's a bit bare bones compared to Delphi, but still good enough for simple projects.

  • Ahead of its time, etc. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Earlybird ( 56426 ) <{slashdot} {at} {purefiction.net}> on Monday February 14, 2005 @06:27PM (#11673086) Homepage
    I don't expect too many Slashdotters know about Delphi because of its Windows origins. Delphi comprises:
    • A Java-like OO dialect of Pascal.
    • A native compiler for this language.
    • An elegant Qt-like component toolkit, comprising both UI widgets and non-visual components such as databases.
    • An elegant set of GUI design tools for this toolkit.
    • An IDE with an integrated interactive debugger.

    The combination lets developers whip up full-featured GUI apps in minutes. This concept was hyped as "RAD" -- rapid application development: Create a new form. Put a tabular editor widget on it. Put a data source component on it. Hook the table widget visually to the data source. Now you have a table containing your database's data.

    Delphi later wooed COM/DCOM and CORBA, and added these two systems as first-class citizens in the language, similar to RMI or Distributed Ruby -- suddenly it was a snap to write an app whose objects lived in a separate process or on a remote machine. It was part of an ill-fated strategy to capture the "middleware" market.

    Borland's Java product, JBuilder, tried to be "Delphi for Java", but failed to live up to the "just works"-quality of its parent product. Even later, Delphi has gone after .NET, but I stopped paying attention long before that.

    Delphi could have been big. It was a masterpiece in engineering. Sadly, Borland shot themselves in the foot in several ways:

    • They treated their users like crap.
    • They focused on the wrong technologies, not the stuff that made Delphi good.
    • They were incredibly slow in going after open source.
    • They handled the open source move badly. When they finally released the InterBase source, they almost immediately changed their minds and went back to making it proprietary again. The open-source version, Firebird, survives, but is no longer aided by Borland in the way that was originaly planned.
    • They let their star visionary/engineer, Anders Hejlsberg, be stolen away by Microsoft along with a handful of other core employees.
    • They annihilated their once-great quality assurance. Delphi 3 and 4 were beta-quality software.
    • They had a brilliant C++ version of Delphi, but it was treated as the idiot inbred cousin, lagging behind in features and being saddled with yet another crummy proprietary, incompatible dialect of C++.
    • They spent a lot of effort on Linux, with the Kylix product, which to my knowledge has never taken off.
    • They did not evolve the language. For example, it was hard to interface with C APIs. (I wrote a rather successful C/C++ translator called htrans that helped me write the wrappers needed to interface with tech such as TAPI, MAPI and various other COM libs; it was the only way.)

    Part of Borland's fall from grace may be blamed on greed -- greed and the dot-com era. They were originally a development tools company. But even after the Philippe Kahn-era attempt to compete with Microsoft (Quattro Pro, etc.) failed, the execs made a similar mistake by going after the gold mine that is the enterprise consultancy business.

    They renamed their company Inprise, touted a bunch of half-assed products, and drowned their web site and communication in buzzwords about enterprise middleware, B2B, application servers and other stuff that were the obvious product of executives, not visionary engineers. They were not just a product company any more, but now also a "solutions" company. And rather than going after common-sense technologies, they went where the hype was. Their new products were also not up to the quality that customers knew and loved from previous products. In the end, they had the arrogance suited for the business, but not the savvy. So they failed.

    Borland have refocused in recent years, and the effort is commendable, but they have not regained their former reputation. For one, I don't know anyone who uses Delphi anymore.

    Perhaps most sign

    • Re:Ahead of its time, etc. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Pig Hogger ( 10379 ) <pig DOT hogger AT gmail DOT com> on Monday February 14, 2005 @06:48PM (#11673247) Journal
      The combination lets developers whip up full-featured GUI apps in minutes. This concept was hyped as "RAD" -- rapid application development: Create a new form. Put a tabular editor widget on it. Put a data source component on it. Hook the table widget visually to the data source. Now you have a table containing your database's data.
      Some years ago in college, in a database class we had to do a presentation on the subject of our choice. This was after a whole session reeking of ASP and VBscript. The professor was a senior database jock whose day job was for $GOVERNMENT_DEPARTMENT that's big on VB.

      So, I brought a Delphi disk, installed it on the class computer, and in 15 minutes demonstrated how you could create a relational database and have a visual application.

      The class was impressed, the prof a bit less, until I showed him the executable which was actually a bona-fide compiled program, without a thousand attendant DLLs.

      He was totally floored.

    • Delphi, how I love thee, let me count the ways (Score:4, Informative)

      by Latent Heat ( 558884 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @06:51PM (#11673277)
      1. Alternative toolset to Microsoft -- if you didn't like the Microsoft way, you had an alternative.

      2. Blazing-fast compiles -- there is nothing out there like it, not even the IBM Jikes Java compiler comes close.

      3. Great string handling. They even extended their dynamically-allocated string idiom to arrays of primitive types.

      4. Made Pascal more C-like -- the PChar C-like null-terminated string (they had to introduce it to be compatible with Windows, but now that they have "gone .NET", they are deprecating it). While it made Pascal less safe, the "I can write a 2-line C program that takes pages of Pascal" kind of went away. You can cast types, pointers, etc, to "remove the safety locks" if need be.

      5. You don't have to use the VCL -- you can program to the Windows API if you are so inclined.

      6. Good debugger, {$APPTYPE CONSOLE} compiler pragma allows opening a console Window in a Windows app for logging traces, etc.

      7. While the support for COM and ActiveX not nearly as seemless as the VCL, a lot better than MFC/ATL.

      What don't I like? I am old Pascal hand, but all that typing is getting a little tiresome after doing work in Java and C++. Also, an ActiveX control is this single .OCX file, and it works across Windows versions. To distribute .VCL controls, you have to have a freakin differnt version for each version of Delphi (Delphi version upgrades break more stuff than Windows upgrades).

      • Ok, here's what I don't like about Delphi:

        1. Bastardized Pascal with an undocumented syntax. Yes, Delphi has no formal syntax definition other than the compiler. See this usenet post [google.com].

        2. The broken type hierarchy. Deriving all the classes from TObject won't replace a decent templating system as the Java folks recently found out.

        3. Libraries from the 80's. No dictionary (aka map) type in the libraries.

        4. Hard to separate GUI from business logic. The visual components expect being connected directly t

        • Delphi works just fine on large projects. It still beats the crap out of .net for win 32 apps.
        • Add to this: Ugly DB component approach.
          While better than VB, the Non-visual components+Data Module Window was poorly thought, unconfortable, and never improved.
          If DM behaved like a view of the components (icon/list view) instead of an invisible form where things needs to be manually arranged should be way better.
          It wasn't really targeted to DB apps anyway, so it wasn't a good choice for this kind of apps.
        • ...in older versions, the binary form files.
          Why, tell me, why they do such stupid thing???

        • 4. Hard to separate GUI from business logic. The visual components expect being connected directly to DB components (TDataSource & TDataset). This is good for quickly snapping up a simple app, but soon it bites back as your app grows.

          I started to run into this problem and quickly discovered stored procedures [64.233.167.104] [google html translation of a good overview stuck in .doc format]. Stored procedures are a great way to encapsulate business logic so that the same data shows up across applications and reports.
      • . ..forgive my ignorance, but doesn't "blazing fast compiles" generally mean bad optimization of binaries? (to processors..)

        .
    • I'm not sure what future Delphi has. One of its advantages was the VCL libraries which were way better than MFC. Now with .NET, Delphi is just another .NET language. Delphi 8 seemed like a clunky mis-step between environments and was replaced in less than a year with Delphi 2005. I doubt I'll upgrade. Borland's documentation has gone from the best to almost non-existant. (And they never document the nickel and dime'ing of missing features from the Pro version vs Enterprise and Architect versions.)
    • Sing it, brother!

      I was so early to Delphi that Borland Australia's sales staff hadn't even heard of it the first time I called up to order a copy. It was only available on CD-ROM, so I had to borrow a friend's CD drive long enough to install it. It was great stuff, and when later versions added extra features, it went from strength to strength. I still use D6, which is quite stable (compared to earlier versions, at least) and a really solid development environment.

      That being said, it's still the pits.
        • I was so early to Delphi that Borland Australia's sales staff hadn't even heard of it the first time I called up to order a copy. It was only available on CD-ROM, so I had to borrow a friend's CD drive long enough to install it.

        Same here. A friend of mine got one of the first units of Delphi 1.0 to reach Norway, and I immediately went over and got a copy -- on floppy disks, as I recall. That was a grand day.

        It's funny how one of the milestones in computer programming was missed by most developers, mai

    • Being an old time Borland user I mean back in the days of Turbo Pascal it does make me sad to see what happened to them. For me the downward spiral started when the failed to deliver TurboPascal for the Amiga. Yes I have a full page ad from Borland for TurboPascal for the Amiga.
      They also had some really interesting programing languages that have since died. Turbo Prolog was very interesting. They also had TurboBasic long before Visual Basic.
      When Borland tried to go into the applications market they even got
    • They had a brilliant C++ version of Delphi, but it was treated as the idiot inbred cousin

      I always had that feeling about C++ syntax too ;-)

  • SWEET (Score:3, Funny)

    by alan_dershowitz ( 586542 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @06:52PM (#11673290)
    Only 8 more years and I can kick it out.
  • The biggest mistake Borland ever made was probably the target marketing for Delphi.

    Borland already had a VB killer and it was called Visual dBASE.
    Now only a shell of what it once was - dBASE at the time was more RAD and more OOP than VB.
    dBASE had back in 90-91:

    1. 2 way design tools
    2. A subclassable component model
    3. XDML (xBase database manipulation language)
    4. A Basic-like syntax
    5. And more

    Borland messed up by thinking all those "visual beginners" could understand basically an academic language (which was

    • Why Delphi needed to be in an "academic language" (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Latent Heat ( 558884 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @08:21PM (#11673966)
      Leave out that Borland's claim to fame and in-house expertise was with Pascal -- the whole Turbo Pascal lineup through the Turbo Object Pascal Windows that immediately preceded Delphi.

      Things that are written in a "weaker" language, such as Visual Basic, tend to have the top level or the parts you are having your newbie app developer write in the "weaker" language, and they tend to have an "industrial-strength" language (such as C++) "under the hood." Visual Basic consumes ActiveX controls that are written by specialist developers in C++. Now in later versions of Visual Basic you could write ActiveX controls in VB, but am I correct in saying that using an ActiveX is considered "easy", but generating an ActiveX is considered pretty hard core, even with all of the VC++ "wizards" to generate the program skeletons?

      You have this type of dichotomy in the "scripting" languages -- you write the app in Python but you write C/C++ extension modules to do the hardcore, time-critical, low-level stuff. The other extreme is Common Lisp, Smalltalk, and Java. While these are considered "easy" languages (not saying Lisp is "easy", but Paul Graham claims he can do much more stuff more quickly with it) -- you are encouraged to do everything in Lisp if you are using Lisp, everything in Java if you are using Java, and while Java has the JNI, its use is discouraged by the official Sun party line. I see Python working on growing from "just being a scripting language" to an attempt, with the right libraries, to make Python another Common Lisp, Smalltalk, or a Java.

      I think that Borland went for the unified approach -- the Visual Form Designer allowed programming with drag and drop, it automatically wrote the Pascal, and you weren't really supposed to touch the Pascal very much. In fact, the generated Pascal was so parsimonious, I was afraid of it because I didn't know what was going on -- a lot of what was going on was that objects were initializing themselves and connecting themselves in the form/control hierarchy by reading in state information from the .DFM files (which you can view as ASCII text -- this forms the "second Delphi" language which is a kind of Pascal-syntax XML).

      Then you had component development, which was supposed to be done by object inheritance and by writing some hard-core Pascal code -- there were (at least a first) no wizards to guide this, and extending a class by inheritance is a much tougher programming job and the code writer-driven composition of a top-level Delphi app.

      Of course, the component developers were supposed to be the hard core programmers, and they could be fewer in number because they would publish their components for reuse for the vast army of Delphi Form Designer weenies. But if the Form Designer weenies were to use dBase Basic, there would have to be a Pascal/C++ other product (at least in the first iteration) to do component developement.

      The argument for a single-language universe is its uniformity. The argument for multiple languages (VB.NET /C#.NET doesn't count as those are simply syntax "skins", but Managed C++ may count) is that different languages are suited for the different levels of an app.

    • Borland already had a VB killer and it was called Visual dBASE. dBASE at the time was more RAD and more OOP than VB. dBASE had back in 90-91:...

      dBASE indeed had some nice features, but to retrofit the collection-oriented approach of dBASE into OOP style well is a nearly impossible task. I think dBASE should have persued the collection-oriented approach and abandoned OOP. It may not have been "in style", but it would fit better with the existing language and philosophy and perhaps been a nice niche player
  • 10 years and the 5th job using Delphi was posted this year as well.

  • R.I.P. (Score:2, Funny)

    by base3 ( 539820 )
    I was listening to talk radio today. Borland Delphi was found dead in its Scotts Valley home at the age of 10. Even if you weren't an Object Pascal anti-Microsoft contrarian raging against the forces of the marketplace, there's no denying its contribution to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
  • I remember visiting the Windows Show in London on Feb 14 1995 - I bought a copy with my own money, wnet back to the office and knocked up a demo in a couple of hours that blew my boss away.

  • I nearly convinced my boss to buy Delphi few years ago. I worked on Visual Basic 6 application and was eager how inflexible Visual Basic is for my current task.
    I forget which edition we wanted to use, but when he saw the price, he stated, that for less money he can have the whole Visual Studio inclusive SQL Server license. (that was the days before .NET)

    And for Kylix, I installed the first version long time ago. It was fun to read on forums, that people used the personal edition like Access client. He ca

  • Reputation carries you a long way (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mattpalmer1086 ( 707360 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @06:37AM (#11676095)
    Delphi was a great language for building windows applications. It's VCL managed to abstract out most of the windows hideousness, enough so that beginners had to learn *nothing* about all of that to make quite good looking, and well behaved applications. If you became more expert, it didn't get in your way either. I stuck with Borland products for years, from Turbo Pascal onwards. Their early products were fast, well structured, high quality beasts that were leaders in their day. The developer community was fantastic.

    But Borland, the company, what can I say. And let's just agree to politely ignore the "Inprise" episode. Over many years I reported several critical bugs in the VCL and IDE using their bug reporting tools, with fixes and workarounds provided, and nothing was done - over several product releases. In my last role, we switched from Delphi to C++ Builder, and that did it for me. Buggy, unstable and zero support, even for critical compiler and linker bugs that prevented us from building our applications for weeks at a time.

    I feel like a valued friend developed Alzheimers. I still miss the old Borland...
  • Since Delphi, programming is fun. I laugh hearing how these other developers clap and brag about their "new features on their languages" when we had have them for years. Delphi came to stay. Converting to Delphi is a no brainer. My current company after seeing what Delphi can do, drop VB and MS C++ and moved to Delphi. Cheers for Delphi, and for many years to come!
  • My first programming job out of high school was Delphi. I originally thought I was going to be doing Java (1.0) but when I arrived they scrapped the Java idea and asked if I wanted to learn Delphi. I already new pascal from my AP CS days and the Intro to CS class I took at college the previous semester. It took me about 3 days to get up and running on it, and to this day it is still probably one of the most fun jobs I've had.

    Delphi itself was a very cool, fun environment to program it. It compiled extr

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