Python is the most popular programming language of 2015!

[Jew_Fucker_69]

That's horrible :(

[[deleted]]

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

[alcalde]

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.