26 Years of Delphi
Yeah, Idera, tell me how great Delphi was before you friggin&#x27; ruined it, like everything you touch.<p>Anyway, we&#x27;ve recently had &quot;FoxPro&quot; guest-star here, and Delphi definitely was one that took its lunch money. Decent small-business relational databases appeared, and people were eager to marry it with fancy GUIs -- maybe even with that new-fangled 32 bit Windows Microsoft was promising. Visual Basic was what Microsoft offered. But for many, the language felt a bit awkward, as did the programming paradigm. I&#x27;m leaning a bit out of the meaphorical window here, but there&#x27;s an argument to be made that VB was closer to 4GLs than &quot;conventional&quot; programming languages.<p>Delphi just really hit a sweet spot. A fast Pascal compiler was to be expected from them, the OO features were available in previous Turbo Pascal versions, too. But all very nicely integrated into a truly RAD IDE -- if what you wanted to develop rapidly was a CRUD Windows app.<p>Still one of the best experiences doing that. I&#x27;d have done more if for a while my corporate masters didn&#x27;t demand Java&#x2F;Swing or sacrificing goats (MFC).<p>And then mobile devices finally ruined every chance of ever getting a decent desktop GUI again.