24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today
For almost 11 years now, I&#x27;ve been working professionally with Delphi.  And it would be wrong to say it&#x27;s been a smooth ride.  There&#x27;s nothing wrong - per say - with Object Pascal.  Or rather, it&#x27;s not worse than C++, but Delphi - i.e. the library and IDE - is what&#x27;s lacking behind.<p>It was definitely cutting edge in the mid-90s, but it has not managed to keep with the times.  Most Delphi developers rely on Indy, a third party library of various classes, that provide a lot of functionality the base library should have provided.  And even Indy isn&#x27;t that quick at picking up new features as the world moves on.<p>When Embarcadero took over from Borland around 2009, they clearly tried to move it on a direction that would encourage more developers.  They created ways to build your Delphi application for iOS and Android, which was meant to get more people to write Delphi.  It didn&#x27;t, since the IDE still cost over $1,000 a year.  I&#x27;d imagine the people who used that functionality were those who were already &#x27;stuck&#x27; with Delphi.<p>Indeed, even as one who engages a lot in the Delphi community, mostly through necessity, notice that very few people join the community without having some legacy application to maintain.  And the community as a whole is dwindling anyway.<p>Embarcadero should have focused on core aspects of the language, which they are finally getting around to.  You can now declare variables in the middle of function?  That&#x27;s so 21st century!  (Although the forward compiler can&#x27;t figure it out, so you&#x27;ll see a lot of red lines in your IDE if you do.)<p>I won&#x27;t be writing Delphi professionally a lot longer, though.  As I am taking a new job this March, where I am moving on to Go.  So it&#x27;s more a bittersweet good bye for me.  Because Delphi is frustrating to work with on a daily basis, but there is a lot nice about it.