Delphi is (was) a pretty decent language and IDE, ahead of its time in its
day. Alas, Borland did everything possible to screw it, including losing key
developers, releasing several buggy/unusable versions in a row, a Linux
fiasco, ignoring bug reports, remaining completely oblivious to essential
features like Unicode, 64 bits, generics... etc, bloating IDE and slowing it
down to a crawl with Java and NET crap, and even breaking parts that were
working at one time, like the help system. It remains to be seen if
Embarcadero will support CodeGear enough to put all the broken pieces
togerther and catch up to the 21st century (D2009 is out with unicode), but
I'm not holding my breath.

If you mean object Pascal, then FPC/Lazarus is trying to be what Delphi
couldn't, but it's a long way off.

Still, both Delphi and FPC are usable. If you are a single developer,
hobbyist, use whatever gets the job done. But as far as job prospects go,
I'd say even Haskell has a better future.

Post a reply to this message