Unfortunately, I don’t think this conversation always happens in the correct order for new developers. The question of the right tool comes up before there is a complete understanding of what it is that they are trying to accomplish. Or even what’s possible.

I wish more new developers were attending technical user groups and conferences (even the free one day vendor sponsored seminars).

XE4 is a bug nest. Should I wait XE5, 6, 12, 100 ?
FireMonkey base code is too “young” (and no, it’s not a “bleedind edge” !)
EMB policy is not very clear (price, no “free” release, bad marketing decisions, and so on…)
Late 64bit compiler (at least is works)
No web tools.

I used to run Delphi 7, it was pretty cool… 10 years ago. Now it has to many competitors.

I read “..2013 will be the Delphi year…”, yes may be, but I don’t buy anymore.

Six months ago, I wrote an app. for a customer in Qt (And yes C++ is less scalable than Delphi I must admit it) but after, I can/could run it under Linux and OS-X without changing ANYTHING ! (only recompiling).
I was stunned.
When the project started up, I wanted to make it in Delphi, but hold on… No Linux support !?
A joke ? No but people at EMB certainly thought that they probably won’t do money with “that” platform.

Got the feeling that EMB bought Borland because their own db suite (Dbartisan, …) are written in Delphi and it would take to much time/money rewriting them.

which tech would you steer (new) developers to? Where did you move to from Delphi after 2003 (was it Qt)? - Thanks.

>One like Delphi, that is a pleasure to work with, and has a devoted following. Employers
>are finding it more difficult to acquire qualified staff, and are willing to offer more to
>good candidates and do more to retain them.

Delphi, in most parts of the world outside a handful of developing nations, is not being used in the enterprise. Employers are not desperately looking for Delphi developers; such Delphi jobs don’t exist. The last time I searched, I arrived at precisely one full-time, permanent position within 40 miles of New York City. Of course, there were two or three more with titles like “C# Developer” who would like someone who also knows Delphi to help migrate Delphi code to C#, but that’s not quite the same thing. I found zero with 40 miles of Baltimore MD and zero within 40 miles of Denver.

Data analysts’ demand will outstrip supply for the next several years at least. Linux developers and admins? Same thing, and they’re also showing much higher raises (companies are fighting to keep them). Big Data - hadoop, noSQL - another high demand area.

Delphi? No. That’s no demand, no evidence of a demand, and advising someone to consider a shrinking pie rather than new, growing markets is bad advice.

>Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying bet your livelihood on a niche technology. I am
>saying position yourself with technologies (note the pluralization) so you can maximize
>the revenue generated from their use. That generally happens on the bleeding edge,
>and the twilight years.

I’d be advising people about mainstream and emerging technologies, not mainstream and dying ones. Someone, somewhere is making money off of OS/2 I’m sure. They’re lucky, not smart.

>Delphi offers a long history of backwards compatibility, and significant popularity (read
>lots of code to maintain).

It’s also DYING. It has no relevance today, and a whole generation of programmers now have never seen a line of Pascal code. It’s also proprietary in the new world of “open” and shepherded by a tone-deaf company. That’s a lot of burdens to put up with.
Most code is also micro-ISV code, not enterprise code.

>It’s community members are often as zealous as Apple fans

That’s not a plus. They’re fanbois, not simply enthusiastic. Say the wrong thing and you’ll be “banned from TeamB” or some other silliness. Again, that’s another burden to put up with.

> and are very helpful to newies.

Delphi doesn’t really have newbies anymore. Speaking of which, the learning material for many other languages dwarfs what’s available for Delphi today. In America, a commercially published book hasn’t been released since 2005, it’s out of colleges, there aren’t any free online courses or web tutorials, you can’t even get a free copy for personal use to use at your own pace. Yet again - more and more burdens, without any gain to make them worth it.

>Delphi offers many of the same features as newer languages,

No. Of everything you wrote, that’s the one I disagree with most. Type inference? Functional programming? Design by contract? Optional dynamic typing? Open source? Array slicing syntax? Automatic memory management? The EMB Delphi version can’t target the JVM or .Net, can’t be embedded as a scripting language, has an antique code layout to support a single pass compiler, is locked into one IDE and its own GUI frameworks, the IDE doesn’t run on OS X or Linux and it doesn’t target Linux… there are lot more I could list. Delphi is behind the times in many areas.

>and has support for web, mobile and desktop to varying degrees.

You’re not counting Intraweb as web support, are you? Other languages have Rails, Asp.Net, Django… one can’t compare. Delphi has no real web support, targets one mobile OS (and it’s arguably easier just to use XCode if you already have a Mac), and FireMonkey still has a lot of bugs and performance issues on Windows and OS X. It’s hardly the one development environment to bind them all at this point in time.

> If FireMonkey and Embarcadero’s mobile efforts succeed, developers could experience
>“bleeding edge” type results in what would otherwise be a product’s twilight years.

Problem: FireMonkey is not “bleeding edge”. Qt does everything it does plus some and has more than ten times the number of developers working on it. It’s one thing to succeed, it’s another to suggest that tiny Embarcadero can produce a bleeding-edge product, especially given all of the growing pains FireMonkey is having right now. One is a big “if” but the other flies in the face of all experience.

>As a niche product, or if you are an aspiring ISV, I think Delphi is worth serious
>consideration.

And I foundf, despite having chosen it myself as the sole development language at a startup from 1995-2003, I couldn’t recommend it to anyone else starting up ten years later. You neglect to address the most important factor: ecosystem. Libraries, books, tools, other developers, courses, etc. Delphi just doesn’t have those things anymore. That would put an aspiring ISV at a HUGE competitive disadvantage. One would have to write from scratch libraries and components that those choosing more popular languages would not. The more Delphi shrinks the harder it will become. A Delphi user is at the mercy of a small private tools vendor and paying higher prices for it too. They lack modern programming paradigms and are saddled with legacy coding conventions. Their skills have no demand there’s precious few resources for anyone to learn them. Writing new code today with a product like that would be a huge mistake. Strong and stable or new and growing would both be far better choices for an ISV. Going with Delphi is like moving to a mist-shrouded island cut off from the mainland with its own TV, cell phone and radio standards unlike anywhere else in the world. It’s quite easy to become isolated and insulated in such an environment and not a good idea.

The reality is that the product has seen its heyday come and go, like Lotus 1-2-3 or DBase. Now if you mention it you’ll hear “That still exists?” or “What’s Delphi?” depending on the age of the person you’re talking to. It also simply looks and feels too antiquated to young developers today. The ecosystem has dwindled… my local bookstore even stocks a bock on Coffeescript, but nothing on Delphi. During its time it was the best at what it did, but times have moved on and it didn’t (sadly, that’s how many users wanted it). It still functions, but it’s no longer cool, it’ll never be cutting edge, and people just aren’t going to use it. No tech tool that’s ever faded into obscurity has ever come back. I’d steer new developers towards where the future lies, not towards the past.

Want some help?