Re: Delphi as a Career Choice in the United States

From: \ (_at_)
Date: 10/10/04 

Date: Sat, 09 Oct 2004 23:03:46 -0400

Ken Revak wrote:
> Seems Borland should be giving the personal version away to universities
> and colleges.
>
> Ken Revak
>
I seem to remember that at one time, Pascal was the 'teaching' language in
university computer science courses. Just about the time that Delphi 1 was
appearing, the universities somehow all decided that C/C++ was what they should
be teaching since it was the mainstream language. If only Delphi had appeared a
year or two earlier, perhaps Pascal would would have become the dominant
language. Of course, that would also depend on Borland having the wisdom to
widely disseminate free or cheap versions just to get the fledgling programmers
hooked and having an aggressive sales/marketing effort. Unfortunately, the far
inferior and cryptic language with the inferior development tool was rammed down
everyone's throat and the rest is history.

I agree that other than setting off a nuke under the Borland marketing
department, the only shot at keeping Delphi from ending up on the scrapheap* of
great computer languages that nobody ever heard of or remembers is to make
Delphi widely available to students. Unfortunately, C/C++ is too entrenched at
the corporate level to easily dislodge at this late date, and the corporate
mentality is like the old saw about "nobody ever getting fired for picking AT&T
(or IBM)" only now the safe choice is anything Microsoft.

*The Scrapheap of Great Programming Languages:
Clipper (bought out and mismanaged into the ground by CA, who also destroyed
several other promising languages and products)
QuickSilver/DBXL (WordTech, bought out and buried by Borland)
FoxPro (which I detested, was bought out is now being quietly smothered by
Microsoft)
Eiffel??, Mumps??
A few others I bought and cannot now even remember their names. Add yours to
the list.

However, there is a downside to success for Delphi. Somebody once said that a
Delphi programmer is about three times more productive than a C++ (or C#?)
programmer. If that is the case, then if everybody was a Delphi programmer, two
thirds of us would be unemployed and we would be even worse off than we are now
<ggg>.

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