Delphi is 31 years old – innovation timeline

Sometimes I miss the times where you had a compact development environment, wit one installer. Your source produced a mostly self contained binary in a reasonable size, you had nice debugging support and quick turnaround times for a compiled language even on a small development machines. And all that for attractive price for a perpetual license (Borland times).

Today it seems I have to give the producer my email address for the 'free' "Delphi History PDF". Well, times have changed. :)

The hardest part of maintaining a long-term project is resisting the urge to over-engineer early on. Striking a balance between a lean core and future extensibility is an art form that often gets ignored in favor of shipping fast.

I remember taking an onsite class to learn Delphi. The class was taught in St Petersburg Florida. Nice place. At the time, I was admiring the tool that Borland created and thought to myself this is a very nice IDE. Too bad my company was switching to all things .Net. The difference between Visual Studio and the Delphi IDE was gut wrenching.

When I was a kid, my older brother worked for Borland. He got me 2 packs of stickers that said "Delphi developers do it better!!!" in red font and a yellow background.

I have very fond memories of working with Delphi 5 and 2005 in the early 2000s. Both the language and IDE were a real pleasure to work with, and they were head and shoulders better than anything from Microsoft at that time. The community was small but enthusiastic and supportive as well.

It would be hard to justify Delphi in a new project today - not because of the tooling or language, but because of the prohibitive license costs.

The original borland delphi had very creative installer graphics:

https://www.gladir.com/SOFTWARE/DELPHI1/delphi1-install5.png

When I was starting out as a kid learning to make applications, moving from VB6 to Delphi was such a huge improvement.

Tempted to use a client's plotter and roll of paper to print this off.

What is dead may never die

Weird but FreePascal is fairly solid for its niche.

31 years old and it can't run on GNU/Linux. What a waste. The future of Delphi is darker than ever.