How Delphi lost its way

23 August 2010 | Technology

Let me first disclose an interest: I have been a Delphi developer since 1996. I've introduced Delphi as a tool to all the companies I worked for since that time. During a decade as a Director of a large R&D team, Delphi formed a key part of the toolbox in my department. Yet, the recent launch of the latest version of Delphi does not give me much joy. Instead, I feel sad and disappointed at what has happened with this great IDE. Numerous new versions and long lists of “improved” and new features cannot hide that Delphi has fallen well behind.

When it arrived on the market, Delphi represented a big step forward in rapid Windows application development. Amongst the key assets of Delphi were its excellent IDE (since abandoned for a new look that I have never felt comfortable with), a very good and up to date compiler and, the jewel in its crown, the VCL. Anyone who has ever written code to show a Window using only the Windows API knows how unwieldy and cumbersome a process that is. To give a user the full Windows experience in terms of look and feel and application behaviour required a lot of effort. The VCL transformed that process and made it really simple, leaving an application programmer to focus on the more important stuff.

The compiler was lightning fast for the day (thank you, Pascal) and produced quite good code for the processors of that age. It meant that well designed native 32-bit applications generated with Delphi performed really well.

Borland could have dominated the IDE industry with Delphi. That it didn't is a tale fit for inclusion in the next edition of “In Search of Stupidity”. Borland failed to fully capitalise on the initial success of Delphi and a gradually growing developer community. From my vantage point, I saw a company where “the suits” took over and pushed it down a pointless road of vanity projects, missed opportunities and blatantly stupid decisions. In some ways, renaming Borland (a very strong brand in software engineering) to the meaningless and unloved “Inprise” illustrated quite well how inept its senior management really had become - culminating in renaming it Borland again after a few years.

In the mean time however, newer versions could not mask the fact that the compiler, the VCL and the core language were not keeping pace with the broader market evolution. Today, the compiler produces really outdated code and, despite so many broken promises, is still missing 64-bit support, leaving Delphi products well behind the competition. The VCL's development has been snail paced and unfocused and many key hindrances have never been resolved properly. I have lost count of how many different database and web development frameworks the company has tried to push over the years. It would be a mistake to think of this as an ever widening toolkit in a fast changing world. In reality, it just meant that Borland would simply abandon one approach for another, often leaving developers stranded.

As sad as it might be, I find that Visual Studio and other tools nowadays offer me the best instruments to meet clients' demands - and that is in spite of the fact that I am not a fan of the .Net concept (just a fancy name for a runtime library as anyone of my age will remember).

As so often, there is little acknowledgement of any of the strategic and operational shortcomings. Instead, excuses are found, promises given but not kept and, as someone with extensive senior management experience I see little evidence for a consistent and strongly focused roadmap, even after Borland committed the ultimate blunder in ditching Delphi altogether (splitting the product off to the brief CodeGear venture, subsequently acquired by Embarcadero).

All the fanfare of the latest release cannot mask the fact that I get an outdated product for much too high a price. When customers and developers complain, they are responded to dismissively, even condescendingly, thus showing not just lack of respect and commercial astuteness but also little appreciation for the importance of the life bringing ecosystem that is a developer community. To add insult to injury, the price is no longer competitive and the upgrade policy is contemptuous.

In the mean time, I'll just continue to get the (often 64-bit) stuff done in Visual Studio and C#. And Delphi and Embarcadero have become a target for jokes and parody, rather than the subject of serious technical writing. What a shame. What incompetence.