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IMO Pascal is a good, clean language and Borland was a top engineering shop that built Delphi as a rapid development tool that supported Windows. At the time there was nothing comparable for Windows development. There was a huge marked for Windows consumer applications and games (Linux was not a household name yet) and very little outside of clumsy Visual Studio to write them. I recall reading at WSJ at the time that Borland CEO was the only person whom Bill Gates feared as a competitor.

That said, it was 20 years ago. Now there are IMO much better cross platform tools for RAD (Python, Tcl/Tk, ...) and Delphi is showing its age (no Linux targets?). Unless I have to live in a Pascal world there are much better tools today. My 2c.

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> no Linux targets?

Linux is coming in the next release - there will be a blog on that soon. It already has Mac, iOS, and Android on top of its Windows support.

Honestly, I do not believe that Python or Tcl/Tk count as "good" RAD cross-platform tools. Only if you've never used something like modern Delphi to compare them to. We regularly have customers give feedback about their productivity with Delphi/C++Builder, versus Python, C#, etc, and they say they get apps completed and released twice as fast or often more. "5x" is quoted often in our marketing material, and that number is not marketing, it's based on numbers people tell us.

- David (one of the PMs at Embarcadero; I work with the blog author Marco.)

They had a Linux port at one time. It was called Kylix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Kylix

Developing on Linux desktop at that time probably wasn't ready for this.

There were some other issues then (I worked for Borland at the time, QAing Kylix) including not really understanding the FOSS community and GPL-the-social-movement part very well.

There was a particularly big flap over them not stripping the corporate audit clause from the free Kylix Open Edition version targeted at OSS dev; and another regarding enforcing the mandatory "Made with Kylix Open Edition" splash screen that was linked into your app at the compiler level, since all the library code was technically modifiable per licensing.

I also seem to recall that they managed to standardize on Red Hat 7.2, which I think had the much maligned gcc 2.96 fork in it and possibly an older glibc, and then had problems with later kernel/glibc/something along those lines versions such that you were locked into the "bad" version of Red Hat using it.

I probably have some of the tech details jumbled 16 years later, but the TL;DR was that the development community for Linux is nothing like the development community for Windows, especially back then. There were simply different cultural expectations and a hugely diverse set of environments to target, along with a swiftly moving ecosystem to link against.

Upshot, Kylix more or less flopped and Borland switched gears to Java/JBuilder-based IDEs for C++ compilation (C++BuilderX), then back around full circle later focusing on single-platform IDEs for .NET/native Windows.

> Only if you've never used something like modern Delphi to compare them to.

The last time I used Delphi it was on version 5. I never used anything for desktop GUIs on Python or Tcl/Tk (or any other language) that comes even close to it. That requirement of "modern" is too outreaching.

But I'm impressed by Python's kivy (but still didn't really use it), and there are some interesting things happening on Haskell circles. I'm optimist in that Delphi's decades old title may fall soon.

Server only though, without GUI support it is a lot less interesting to have linux support.

It is a nice start again though.

David, thank you for the work on Delphi! I think my post was seen as bashing Delphi. It was not the intent; the fact that Delphi has a thriving user community willing to defend it is a proof to its usefulness.

To each his own. I work in a cross platform world with a roughly equal mix of Linux and Windows and my personal preferences are with the standard Unix toolset.

> Now there are IMO much better cross platform tools for RAD (Python, Tcl/Tk, ...)

That's why I wrote "in combination with easy deployment". Yes, you can do faster RAD in Python but good luck with easy deployment.

Tcl/Tk is trivial to deploy; on linux and OS X, wish already exists and tclkit makes it easy to deploy in windows.

>Now there are IMO much better cross platform tools for RAD (Python, Tcl/Tk, ...) and Delphi is showing its age

Tk is the better than Delphi RAD tool?

The beauty is in the eye of the beholder (and I put IMOs liberally in my post). The OP mentioned GUI prototyping and I was viewing Tk in this context. For rapid prototyping, Tk is a better solution for me, by far.

It is a very simple, script language that allows creating dynamic GUIs on the fly. I can make a simple GUI and hang calls on buttons and menus with a few lines of text. No compiling. No library mismatches to deal with. Whiteboard sketch to a working prototype often takes less than an hour, almost never more than a day.

It is cross platform and text based, so we can email prototypes around for people to try it on their Windows, Linux and Mac machines, click on buttons and report what they want to change. It is text, and does not require installing software. This is a noticeable advantage in locked-down environments, where installing Tk once and running 10 scripts is much easier than installing 10 revs of software.

Due to the language simplicity we had people who said they have no idea about it (and no plans to learn it -- they just wanted a prototype) making and sending back mods within a few days of getting the prototype. This is great -- then we know that this is what they want.

Tk is long in the tooth and has many limitations, but for rapid GUI prototyping it is one of the most useful tools for me.

>It is a very simple, script language that allows creating dynamic GUIs on the fly.

Very limited ones. And ones clients will have a shock when seeing. And still coding it all together.

With Delphi you can drag and drop great looking (and more full featured) prototypes in zero time.

It will be limited to Windows, though, I'll give you that.

Clients having a shock after seeing a prototype says a lot about the author and very little about the language the code was written in.

Can you clarify "coding it all together" part. I have no idea what you meant.

Delphi GUI building is drag-and-drop - no coding.

Of course for more than trivial built-in behaviours you'll be writing code, but for a UI prototype, especially if it's just CRUD forms etc., you can get it built in a few minutes with no code. Drop a database connection component and set the connection properties, and you'll get live data and properly typed and bound controls on the form too.

Compilation takes fractions of a second, so that's not an impediment to design iteration - but you don't need to compile or run to see what it looks like since it's effectively a WYSIWYG form designer.

Problem with Delphi-style RAD tools is that there is huge step in complexity between things that can be done in the designer and these that can not. And this invites particular style of "programming" that consists of searching the internet for existing components and connecting these components together with horrible hacks. It is perfectly possible to write well-structured application in Delphi, but most are not.

[Edit: hit reply too soon] Tk model of UI programming does not promote this that much, because causing stuff to happen by writing code is the default way. Also Tk-style approach of writing GUI definitions in code and letting the toolkit to deal with details like positioning (in fact, using HTML for UI is mostly similar) is more productive.

I don't really want to get into a long-winded discussion, but (a) the GUI definition in Delphi is also code (specifically: there's a declarative syntax for constructing a tree of components with property values); and (b) positioning is handled by the VCL. Typically you specify things like alignments and borders in the designer, and the VCL takes care of keeping things positioned.

I really wish HTML was as easy to design with as the VCL designer. Trying to e.g. create vertically centered children is far, far easier in the VCL than in HTML + CSS.

> It will be limited to Windows, though, I'll give you that.

Rather, it'll be limited to Windows, macOS, iOS and Android. :)

I'm assuming this person hasn't actually used Delphi...or Python Tcl/Tk.

I can throw together a very nice looking GUI app in one sitting in Delphi, where laying out the elements and binding and defining events is absolutely trivial.

In Python, with Tcl/Tk, I don't. I use C#, qt, or even flask. Tcl/Tk is absolutely not appropriate for RAD GUI development, unless it's at some hello world level of complexity.

For my scientific needs, it was more than adequate, and scientists are a big part of programmers (but not necessarily professionals). However in that league eye candy does not count, instead saving lives or making our world better are of bigger priority. Tcl/TK or in its incarnations ScicolsLab/Tkinter/ Ocaml-Tk have saved the day very often.

For Tcl/Tk, there's vTcl which resembles Visual Basic 3.0 (for Windows) as far as laying things out. It supports all three of Tk's geometry managers (grid, pack, place) and you can simply drag-and-drop your way to a GUI in seconds if you're into that kind of thing.

Further, there are several experimental projects that support running Tcl/Tk over HTTP/HTML rather than X11, Win32, SDL, the current Mac OS X/macOS GUI system.

TkWeb and WubTk are examples of this.

They produced Kylix not that long ago - I had an original box set once upon a time. I have no idea why that didn't take off, but it was an excellent environment really.

> I have no idea why that didn't take off, but it was an excellent environment really.

- It was a wrapper around Qt

- Had some dependencies on Wine

- The set of available controls was small

- It was closed source

- They expected GNU/Linux developers to be willing to pay for it

To clarify: dependency on wine means that the IDE was essentially windows application (stripped-down delphi) running on top of wine . Wine was not required for deployment of applications.

Kylix was doomed from day one; I saw an official presentation (IIRC by Marco Cantù himself) ages ago and was shocked by its slugginess. At that time I was playing with Delphi2 at home and using Delphi 4 at work, and both of them literally run circles around Kylix. Today Delphi on Linux to me is called Lazarus. Some nasty bugs plaguing it are long gone since like 3 years and is very stable at the moment. You can even install it on a ARM based board (Orange PI PC here) which means it doesn't simply cross compile the code but the IDE itself runs on ARM architecture!

kylix came out in 2001. That's verging on medieval :)

yeah i remember reading about kylix in a paper magazine.

Do you even know what RAD means?

20 years ago, RAD meant that you could drop visual components on a form, add some events, set some properties, and hit the green run button to compile and run it.

A very visual way of programming.

QtCreator with it's visual designer comes close, but then you have to suffer a more unforgiving syntax (C++), a complex macro compiler (MOC) and not at all easy cross-compilation / distribution.

You could try Free Pascal related Lazarus instead.

Netbeans Swing support also comes close.

I have been following Lazarus / Free Pascal for years - and, as it turns out, started using it in earnest one week ago. It's great! :)

In 1994, I was looking at languages for a Windows GUI project, and I narrowed my options down to Borland ObjectVision (a sort-of "predecessor" to Delphi) and Visual Basic 3.0. I went with VB3 because the userbase was larger, but I've always wondered how my career would have played out if I'd chosen the other path.

You're probably thinking of Object Windows Library (OWL) [1], a C++ library that was available to both Turbo Pascal for Windows and Borland C++, and which was briefly available for other platforms, including several Unix variants.

Borland also had the older Turbo Vision toolkit, but that was for MS-DOS. OWL was designed a very similar class hiearchy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Windows_Library

Please search before jumping to conclusions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ObjectVision

>Now there are IMO much better cross platform tools for RAD (Python, Tcl/Tk,

TCL/TK is about 20 years old if not more.

Microsoft poached some of the top Delphi designers for C#.

As the saying goes, if you can't beat 'em...

"That lead architect was:"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7614808

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