Splitting the Delphi heritage

Posted by Peter van Ooijen on February 10, 2006

This was found in a comment on Eric’s post on open source and IDE’s which refelected on Delphi for sale. There is an online petition asking Mark ShuttleWorth to buy Delphi and release it as free software. Nice. But…….


In my goodbye to Delphi post I mentioned some things hindering the further evolution of Delphi:



  • Need for backwards compatibility
  • Staying alive in the eco system of Borlands tools

Delphi is now freed from the latter. Releasing it as open source will satisfy the first. But imho the Spirit of Delphi torch is now in Chrome‘s hands.

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  • http://weblogs.asp.net/fbouma Frans Bouma

    What I always wonder is: why on earth do people try so hard to keep alive those ugly Wirth languages? (Sorry mr. Wirth, I admire your work, but the languages you produced are not my panacea when it comes to productive writing code)

    They’re excellent for teaching programming, though IMHO arent that great when it comes to writing code. Everyone who made the transition from pascal to C knows that: you suddenly had more power, could do more with less code.

  • http://codebetter.com/blogs/peter.van.ooijen/default.aspx pvanooijen

    It’s in the first place a matter of historical nostalgia :)

    A lot of essetial stuff in Delphi, like interfaces and events (not the Wirth stuff), comes so much closer to the way .net does them than C++. Delphi deserves a big place in the history of “programming for the PC”

  • http://ebersys.blogspot.com/ Eber Irigoyen

    “What I always wonder is: why on earth do people try so hard to keep alive those ugly Wirth languages? (Sorry mr. Wirth, I admire your work, but the languages you produced are not my panacea when it comes to productive writing code)”

    actually many of the “modern” things found in today’s languages, came from Delphi (which came from Pascal)
    but of course very few people knows that because Borland did a great job at not telling anyone

    as for the petition, it just comes to show how poor the Delphi community is, sad