Is Delphi dead?
As a developer that grew up on Delphi 1.0 through Delphi 7.0 I am a little saddened at what has happened to Delphi as a product. I recall the local Borland Delphi 8.0 launch where they touted that Delphi was now a first class citizen on the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 and that their product releases would coincide with the framework releases. Unfortunately this didn't seem to materialise as I waited at least a few months for updates to Delphi 8.0 to support service pack 1 of the .NET framework 1.1. This has forced me to move to Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 for managed code and to maintain existing code in Delphi 7.0 with the plan to migrate the code where time permits.
Recently Borland formed a new company called CodeGear for its IDE products so I decided to take a look and see what its offerings are. I'd heard about Delphi 2006 being out but wasn't invited to the launch or sent a trial copy which I find quite shocking being a registered user. So I took a look at its datasheet and noticed that it still only support the .NET Framework 1.1. Why not .NET Framework 2.0? Come on Borland/CodeGear!
And look there is now a Delphi 2007 for Win32 and Delphi for PHP. Where is the new .NET Framework edition, or don't they plan to support the .NET Framework anymore? Ok so maybe they are focussing on the non-managed code for a while, how about some 64-bit compiler support? Don't they realise that the platform is evolving and that if Delphi is to be considered as a real development language/tool/IDE then it needs to be able to scale.
Oh and whats this PHP support now? Why target the language called PHP in a product called Delphi where Delphi is the new name for Object Pascal. CodeGear are you trying to confuse the remaining patriots?
Well it doesn't seem like its dead just yet, but I believe it will be soon. From what I've heard the South African market is not growing like it used to. How sad.