> The pricing is just out of this wolrd. You get the impression that they try to squeeze every last penny out of their existing user base.

I used to think that about Delphi, various commercial Lisp implementations, etc. But after some time I've changed my view a little.

My change is because I realized that Delphi had its chance, and kept on trying as the chance slipped away. No amount of competitive pricing today is going to make a resurgence of Delphi happen. That door is closed, for all practical purposes.

The alternative is to offer products and support in a sustainable way and given the small number of people using Delphi professionally today, that means charging somewhat hefty amounts. IOW, their target market is business that has Delphi products that are worthwhile to maintain. In order to stay in business and provide service they have shed casual users.

> No amount of competitive pricing today is going to make a resurgence of Delphi happen.

I disagree. Delphi is still great, and with a less tone-deaf it could get very well.

Note that Delphi still have a healthy position today:

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

(Position 9, above Ruby! and others!)

(As much as we can debate about Tiobe and other indexs, is important to note that is still way higher that many will expect, and the flow of information we see in the community is very good, much more than many other hispers options)

The thing is that price is in fact the main problem. This kill the open source ecosystem options around it.

I will totally, like many others (I know, I'm moderator in on of the most important forum in Latin-America) work more for it but without a way to reach a large audience it kill many ideas we have.

Delphi was the most sucesfully opensource but commercial (as, you have the source) with many thirdy-party options. Think like the current React-Components market but maybe larger and years ago.

I think any company that would buy Delphi will agree more with me than with you.

If you're right and companies just can't see that or make it work, can the community do more with Lazarus? I have not played with that so I don't know how good it is.

Most companies will ruin any language, specially if you get into the idea that is for sell as in the 90s. No way this could work today.

We (the community) have tell Borland and sub-sequent owners exactly what to do, and have been never been heared.

To see why it failed, read :

https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Borland-fail

In the height of the enterprise transformation, I asked Del Yocam, one of many interim CEOs after Kahn, "Are you saying you want to trade a million loyal $100 customers for a hundred $1 million customers?" Yocam replied without hesitation "Absolutely."

This is it. Management trade a large and healthy ecosystem chasing the rainbows.

This will fail for sure.

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Lazarus is ok, except that suffer from the same disease of most open source projects: Lack of focus and good funding.

Because what you were telling them is wrong.

Look at every other Delphi competitor from the time period. Microsoft is giving Visual Studio away to casual users and Visual Basic is now VB.Net. Eclipse and IntelliJ come in free versions. There is no longer a market for a million loyal $100 customers for a programming language and ecosystem. There are too many high-quality free languages, compilers and IDEs to make that business model work anymore.

The appstore model is almost that.

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We know the old model will not apply here. That is clear. That is not what we have tell them.

What we have tell them is that the tool must have a opensource compiler, and free tier and a reasonable pro tier. Xamarin was a good sample.

Also, take in account that the millon loyal customer is not that unreasonable to find:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2418435/how-many-delphi-...

Just because Visual Studio can be free doesn't mean it's not selling for $5000 per license.

For a while it was true - it seemed like the OS IDEs would win, and _definitely_ no one would actually _pay_ for an IDE.

Until JetBrains came on to the scene.

There's a sort of a hobbyist/professional split. There's a lot of grey area inbetween, but it's easier to reason about it if you think of two markets. One will pay, one won't if there are acceptable free alternatives. But it turns out that there are rather big synergies to be had from both camps using versions of the same tooling. So you have enterprises that are willing to buy pro versions of tools at prices that subsidize the existence of users at the free tier. That's nothing like the old Borland model that the post I was responding to wants Delphi to go back to.

Now imagine being used to Delphi and C++ Builder, trying to search for similar tooling on UNIX, back in the mid-90's.

The only options available were a few 4GLs that cost more than even Delphi licenses are worth nowadays.

I came to Unix at that time with Delphi fresh in my mind (Delphi 1/2 IIRC ) and the only thing that showed anywhere near similar promise was Qt, though it took a long time for it to get similar features in both the object model (properties etc) and the UI builder.

One of the many things I loved about Delphi compared to other RAD tools of the time was that it was the only one that supported and encouraged modular separation of logic and UI. In most others (VB!), the IDE did nothing to help you, and most people ended up with all their logic mixed into the UI code, simply because the UI code was the focus of the whole IDE.

I learned to program using Borland Turbo C for DOS, but my first GUI applications were built with Delphi 2.0, which was the first 32-bit version. I earned my first money ever selling a shareware application I built with Delphi, before reaching puberty yet!

The Windows platform was awful so I ran away to Unix, and trying to find something even close to Delphi was just impossible. The best thing we had was Tcl/Tk, which I used a fair bit.

I tried Java at the time and remember saying to myself: You got to be kidding me.

Eventually I gave up on GUI development for Unix and embraced the web browser is the UI philosophy and develop the back-end in Python (then a fairly new language). Best career move I ever made.

I'm still fond of Delphi, it was a great product.

> The IDE is just so far behind the competition. Crashing all the time an slow. Theming support ist very limited (to date). Delphi Code Insight ("Intellisense") is slow and sometimes just refuses to work and is generally not on par with other offerings

I'm 100% with you. That's why I switched from Delphi IDE to Visual Studio Code with OmniPascal (www.omnipascal.com). It's much nicer to work in a state-of-the-art editor.

>SAP

IIRC the average SAP deployment is in the region of $10 million.

Sure, for enterprise-level things that's justifiable, but most businesses don't have that sort of money to throw around.

And even with $10 million, SAP has a plain ugly UI - ASCII based controls from the 1980s coded with a COBOL inspired script language also from the 1980s.

Yeah true. I copied part of my comment from another comment I did regarding Delphi. So this mention of SAP lacks context. None the less Delphi is lauded for the speed and convenience with which you can create database applications but but compared with a language that was designed especially for it is not that great and Delphi's abstractions you have to use to "do it the Delphi way" and get the outlined advandtages just fall apart in more complex scenarios and begin standin in your way or are straight anti patterns.