Delphi 2009 has potential, but will it get enough traction?
Posted on Thursday, February 12, 2009 at 1:53 AM.Today I saw a post that Hans-Eric made to his blog on Monday about Delphi 2009. He seemed quite pleased with it, specifically mentioning its support for anonymous methods.
The last few years haven't been particularly good for Delphi. Many people reported stability problems with Dephi 8 and Delphi 2005. Things got better with the release of Delphi 2006, but soon there arose uncertainty due to Borland's attempt to sell it off, along with some of their other software products. That wasn't entirely successful, so they spun off CodeGear, which was eventually acquired by Embarcadero. Delphi 2009, however, does seem to be bringing some comfort and certainty to the community.
Delphi 2009 includes some interesting new features. It apparently now has much better Unicode support, as well as support for generics. It also has support for anonymous methods, as pointed out by Hans-Eric. These are the sort of features that Delphi will need in order to compete with Java, C# and VB.NET.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure how much traction Delphi 2009 will gain with hobbyist or amateur developers. For such users, even the Delphi 2009 Professional edition would likely prove to be quite costly. It's difficult to justify such expenditure, especially with free IDEs like NetBeans, Eclipse, and #Develop available for some of the other popular languages. There is a trial version available, so at least it gives a way for new users to give it a try.
I would like to see Delphi more widely used. In the past I've worked with software written in Delphi, and it generally tends to have higher quality code than one often sees from applications written in VB.NET. Indeed, it sounds like Delphi is headed in the right general direction with this latest release. I hope that it can generate more interest, and become more widely used, if only just to bring slightly more diversity to the Windows software development scene.
