I've been a Delphi developer off and on for 20+ years (since 2, though dabbled with 1). A lot of people focus on the object pascal and it is dated as a language, though the latest is catching up. The IDE has problems now and then with code completion - it pauses a lot and sometimes just stops working, if you come from Visual Studio or XCode this is incomprehensible and annoying.
Where Delphi shines is the VCL - the Visual Component Library and the third party component market. You can integrate components into the IDE by writing them in pascal. Even now there are still lots of components for pretty well anything - even web development.
It also has cross platform components that you can run on iOS/Android/Mac and Windows (edit: theres also a server side linux one) all with the same code, they are compiled to native and if you want you can write native components on all these platforms.
A lot of windows C# components available for sale are actually written in Delphi
You can connect to databases using components, I've written native socket servers by just dragging a couple of components on to a form. For writing business apps there is nothing superior imho
There are components for web development where you can write an SPA all in Pascal and use components
Delphi shines in so many ways - I tried to develop something in Go but I hit a brick wall with a sub-par editor (Visual Studio Code), all kinds of restrictions, no way to make halfway acceptable GUI apps, a slow runtime, a slow compiler, unacceptable formatting rules, totally hopeless. Rust has even worse issues. I considered C, C++, Java and PHP 7.3 but I'm basically forced into using Delphi again for a new major project.
I'd rather not use Delphi, since it's hard to find developers for it and investors won't like it. But there just aren't better or even acceptable alternatives for the type of development I do (3rd wave AI, building a graph database from scratch, processing TB's of data, dynamic visualisations etc.)
So the plan is to build all this unique functionality with Delphi and then, when I have something sellable, perhaps get it rewritten in Rust or something, when those tools have become better.
Even though I'm an old fogie and highly experienced with Delphi, I also do embedded dev. in C and have done so for decades, plus I recently built an enterprise-level PHP online store from scratch. I've been a vocal critic of Delphi for decades as well (even banned on Embarcadero's forums) and in 2019, I do not know of anything that compares to Delphi...
Our last two hires were guys without any prior Delphi experience. They did have Java, C++, Python etc background, tho. We sent them off to a two day intro course and with some assistance they were doing useful work within a couple of weeks.
A small investment IMO if you plan on keeping your employees for a while...
The last time I was seriously using object Pascal was in the Turbo Pascal days. Even after all this time, it's had a warm place in my heart, despite myriad languages beneath my belt.
It's great that there's community edition for Delphi now. Thanks for the link!
You absolutely MUST click on "I agree to receive Embarcadero marketing communications via email and phone call" before being able to download it. How is this compliant with GDPR? I also notice that if you change countries, the whole form to be filled out also changes (but the above stipulation remains).
Then there's also:
> Licenses are valid for a one-year term subject to the revenue restrictions.
This is definitely the least 'community oriented' product Ive ever encountered!
I'm sorry, but companies doing stunts like this simply cannot be trusted. It's a shame, because I really did want to consider rekindling my love of development in Pascal, but dealing with a company like this is an utter deal breaker. The sad thing is that it's most likely the marketing people in that company that are pushing for this... and I'm sure the developers there would love to have an open community edition, unlike what is actually being presented.
Where Delphi shines is the VCL - the Visual Component Library and the third party component market. You can integrate components into the IDE by writing them in pascal. Even now there are still lots of components for pretty well anything - even web development.
It also has cross platform components that you can run on iOS/Android/Mac and Windows (edit: theres also a server side linux one) all with the same code, they are compiled to native and if you want you can write native components on all these platforms.
A lot of windows C# components available for sale are actually written in Delphi
You can connect to databases using components, I've written native socket servers by just dragging a couple of components on to a form. For writing business apps there is nothing superior imho
There are components for web development where you can write an SPA all in Pascal and use components
There's a free community edition available now https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter so if you've never looked at Delphi have a look.