Maybe I have been in a cave too long but what is the deal with Borland? With few exceptions, like Delphi 6 and 8, Borland has released phenomonal applications. Delphi is still the best Windows-based RAD tool available. Bar none. I have tried many other IDE's/languages but they are all pretenders to the throne. C, C++, VB, .NET and C# all pale in comparison to what Delphi offers. Sure C# bears a resemblance to Delphi in many ways thanks to the ex-Borland employees that are at Microsoft but it still isn't quite there. .NET, its shifting functionality and oddities have left me unimpressed and I still will pick Delphi for much of my tasks. Why? The first part is the tool. Delphi and its objects are relatively consistent, named well, behave well and just flat out make sense. Add to that the wide base of Delphi developers and the fact that they will share their source code and time to help with nearly any programming issue and you have a killer package. In the past, and even recently, I have worked with tools that may have some nice features but the community that revolves around the tools leave something to be desired. Take Visual Basic for example. I know this is a generalization but it is a generalization because I have seen it happen far too often. Ask for help in a news group and you will get a million RTFM's. Ask someone to share their code and you would think you had asked them to give you the Holy Grail to hold some paint to do your window sill. Ask someone how they would do something and they will go off on a tangent and tell you that you don't know what you are doing. If I wanted that kind of abuse I would meet a young lady all dressed in leather. When I first started using Delphi I had been developing for many years and hadn't actually used Pascal in any form. One of the first resources that I found was the SWAG and it was amazing. Every odd little task was spelled out with source code and it was all for the taking and as the community continued to grow the desire to share grew as well. Now you have Torry, Delphi Super Pages, etc. and they all are full of components and test applications that come with full source and that is just a few of the many excellent Delphi sites. Add in a true genius like Mike Lischke and you have a recipe for absolute development success. Which brings me to the reason that I started writing this post. Borland. What has happened to you? When I started using your products, Borland C++ and Turbo C way back in the day, I discovered an excellent company that was blazing a trail that few could manage to follow. Somewhere along the way you lost focus and now you are trying to sell off Delphi and the other IDE's. What are you thinking Borland? You need to go to your roots and hang on to these products for dear life or failing that do the right thing and release the full source code and license of Delphi to the open source community and let them sort out your mistakes and push Delphi to the next level.

Related Posts

Developer Survey

---