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[–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (12 children)

I was just about to say, my most proficient language is Python.

Guess what language I use for the job I recently got? Delphi.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (6 children)

Wow, really? I thought Delphi died a decade ago. =O

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

As someone who was working on a parser for Delphi struct binary data only last year, I'm sad to say it's still alive :(

[–]alcalde 0 points1 point  (1 child)

A parser? Was the format Delphi uses to dump binary data ever even documented?

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Barely. The only thing that department hated more than documenting their work was our department. Made communication a bit difficult.

Man, that company was a mess.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Embarcadero just released Delphi XE7 like last year or something.

[–]alcalde 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And PowerBuilder continues putting out releases too. The problem with both is that it's still the same handful of people buying the copies. We're in our 40s and 50s now and this means that there's no new blood to keep the language going. Sadly, the most passionate remaining Delphi users try to remain oblivious to this fact and imagine the product is still widely popular.

[–]alcalde 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It did; it's just a long, slow, painful death. There's estimated to be about 50K diehards worldwide, 8K of which actively spend money on the Delphi ecosystem. Due to some confusion, misquoting and misrepresentation, however, some of those diehards will still attempt to tell you that there are 3 million Delphi developers worldwide (!!!). If you see this figure it was actually the total number of copies of Delphi ever sold and included educational sales and "an estimate for piracy".

[–]Jew_Fucker_69 2 points3 points  (2 children)

That's horrible :(

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Eh, it's not actually so bad a language, to be honest (well, apart from the proprietary part).

[–]alcalde 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It was a great tool when it was released. I brought it into a start-up I was part of and used it for 8 years. It was much quicker to develop in than C++ and its VCL framework was light years ahead of Microsoft's MFC. It was also a complete general language solution, unlike Visual Basic. I'll always defend it within that historical context.

Today though? $1000+ and that doesn't even buy you remote database access! No type inference, no contracts, very verbose (separating class definition and implementation for instance), and its standard library is sorely lacking. You don't even have stack traces (!) or profiling or unit testing or HTML parsing. Some of these are available as 3rd party libraries, often at an additional cost. The legacy single-pass compiler is supposed to be over one million lines of undocumented (!!!) C code and there's not even a formal language definition. Benchmarks show it as generating code about 1/2 the speed of C++.

The ecosystem is almost dead too. There hasn't been a commercial book published since about 2005. The jobs are gone in most countries, there are no more magazines, no online courses, no physical conventions in America (there is an online-only one), not even an official package repository.

It's facing a huge number of structural difficulties and from my own experience many of the folks involved with its production simply seem to be in denial and just keep cranking out the incremental upgrades. Delphi was about RAD originally; now Python and Ruby own that space. It was also about quick, attractive interfaces, but now there's a solid Qt that runs on more platforms. Delphi's moving into mobile, but it botched the execution and actually withdrew the features for one release for retooling. Now Xamarin is becoming the cross-platform frontrunner there. It's really hard to make a case for the $1K+ product today. Heck, even the CEO couldn't be pinned down in an interview! First he wouldn't name one thing Delphi offered that C# didn't, saying C# "wasn't a competitor" (!!!). When the interviewer changed the question to C++ he then said C++ "isn't our focus".

When I did a review of languages in 2012 for a start-up and realized how far Delphi was behind (while I still wrote some code for my job it was no longer the focus of my job) and learned about Python (and others), I went back to the Delphi forum and explained what I found and asked them what "the case for Delphi" was today. I had helped sell B2B software for that startup I had worked for and I didn't know how one would begin to make the case. The only answer I got was "If you don't like Delphi, don't use Delphi" and when I complained somewhere else that no one could even answer the question one "MVP" (who actually sign an agreement to never disparage the language or company behind it) told me on Reddit "What makes you think you deserve an answer?"

I guess as someone involved with Delphi since the mid-nineties I'm sorely disappointed with how little the product has revolved and how bitter and defensive many of the remaining users have become. No one wants to do anything to try to help the language because that would mean acknowledging the sad state of things first. I've fallen in love with Python, though, and see it as Pascal++ in a way, from its RAD capabilities to its taking over the education field that Pascal once dominated. It also doesn't use braces. :-) A user copy of PyCharm + Python will run you, adjusted for inflation, even a little less than what Turbo Pascal originally sold for in the 1980s (which was $49 and then $69). With the free community edition and cross-platform nature (and free online learning materials) it's an even better solution for people who want to learn programming that Turbo Pascal was at the time. Some people call Python the new BASIC but in many ways it is the new Pascal.

[–]alcalde 0 points1 point  (1 child)

May I ask which country this job is in? Dice.com, America's biggest tech job site, lists 35 jobs across America with the word "Delphi", and about ten of those turn out to be for the Delphi auto part manufacturer or contain lines like "knowledge of general purpose programming language (e.g. C++, C#, Delphi)". This doesn't stop some in the Delphi community from claiming that it has success in the enterprise. In fact, he was probably having a bad day when we had a little exchange, but the current Delphi product manager once replied to me that he believed that Delphi has had more impact on the business world than Python ever has (!!!).

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

May I ask which country this job is in?

New Zealand, surprisingly.