"What, is Delphi still around?", I can hear you thinking. But yes it's still kicking, though Borland has been making a pretty good effort to kill it off completely, not by least with it the stupid move to discontinue the Personal Edition download. Nowadays, you are supposed to only get the Personal Edition with a CD ad in selected computer magazines. It's one thing to combat piracy by limiting access to "pro" versions of the software, but hey, if you don't have the user base, who's going to pirate your software? Especially in Europe, Borland's guerrilla marketing for Delphi by offering the licenses to universities and personal editions was working just fine, but not anymore. Surely, .NET has had a big role in the near demise of Delphi as well, but I can't help but thinking the times when Delphi was so far ahead of VB.
So anyway, the other day I had to do some WIN32 API programming and I couldn't afford to use C# on it, so I figured I just hack it up in Delphi. Because you know, why in the earth would I have to suffer through C/C++ programming for a simple UI demo which any sad little 386 machine could run? The other nice thing was that I could port parts of the code to Linux/Kylix/Lazarus later. So my choice was Delphi, since after all, I had learned myself the basics of object-oriented programming with Delphi 4... uh huh - should I even think about this - over ten years ago. It was kind of like coming back home, or more precisely, to your childhood home, where you found everything to be exactly as you had left them and all the memories of the little secrets and tricks came back to you. It's kind of sad that in these ten years, Windows programming hasn't changed much. .NET was long due.
However, because of Borland's ridiculous marketing decisions, it wasn't such a simple thing to find a copy of Delphi personal edition. But once I set my mind on something, I don't give up easily. I did *a lot* of googling around, and after several hours, when I was almost ready to give up on this, I found a post on a discussion forum giving me a link to download the personal edition. The best thing of course is that as far as I know, it's a perfect legal download of Delphi 7 Personal Edition available straight from Borland, not the main site though, but their Polish site. Funny huh?
Back to the state of Delphi thouh. I'm sure there are stil quite a lot of enterprise customers paying big bucks for Delphi Enterprise licenses to Borland. But the writing is on the wall and I'm surely Borland people can see it: the pie is shrinking (as the post implies, there are some good comments in the end), and to protect the profits, they are raising the price of the pie. Maybe it works for a while, but the more the price increases, the less pie eaters there will be. Come on now Borland, you know it makes sense, open source Delphi with a dual license. Enterprise customers will get the support they need, you keep ownership of the code and some free bug fixes to help your (ridiculously small, I'm guessing) team developing Delphi IDE further, while students and the poor one-man shops will get Delphi for free. Best of both worlds, right?