Section 6: What are the advantages, what are the disadvantages
In summary, Delphi is a standard setting development tool. It allows even relatively inexperienced programmers to develop professional
applications that attach to industry standard databases, access the web, display multimedia, and use the latest Windows controls. It is
rapid to develop with, and produces efficient native executables.
It's reasonably stable, has a large and endlessly helpful installed user base (try the comp.lang.pascal.delphi.* newsgroups if you ever
get stuck... with anything), and is being kept up to date and on the cutting edge with present and future techn
ologies by its authors.
Based on component technology, it is often the case that the code you would have needed to spend weeks writing can be bought, pre-written
and debugged, for a fraction of the cost involved in spending the time writing it yourself.
On
the disadvantage side... you may have to put up with your unenlightened programming colleagues telling you that "real programmers use C
and C++" and the occasional Visual basic programmer trying to tell you that VB is all you need, and all other languages are superfluous.
Oh, and it might crash occasionally... but in 5 years of Delphi programming, I have yet to lose a single line of code. OK, OK, I have
lost lots of code, but its been my own fault every time.
It's a contentious issue, but it could be argued that Delphi may not survive much longer. I would strongly argue that this is not the
case, but Delphi does occupy a niche in the market, and as such its position is more fragile than that of say C or C++. However, as
Inprise is just about to launch Delphi version 5, and as Microsoft has just licensed compiler writing technologies from Inprise (at huge
expense) it is unlikely that either Inrpise or Delphi will disappear any time soon.
One other issue you might like to take on board is the rather single minded approach that Delphi adopts. Delphi is only suitable for
writing software for Windows, and then only when it is running on an Intel platform (or something that carefully simulates an Intel
platform, like the Windows emulators available for the Macs).
With the sudden rise in popularity of the Linux operating system, it may be time for programmers to start reading up on the
development tools available for that! Suffice to say, there is a little time left for Windows yet, and it is my belief that time invested
in learning about Delphi is time well spent in any case. Many other development tools are now based on the Delphi model, and hence your
new skills are likely to be at least partially transferable. There are in fact a number of people working on an open source
implementation of a compiler tool based on Delphi, but with the Linux Operating System as its target. In addition, forward thinking
organisation that they are, Inprise has already started to look at the issue of producing software development tools for Linux
themselves. This is an exciting concept, if Borland produced a Delphi like product for Linux, then that would be a very signif
icant change in the immediate future of home computing... well worth submitting your opinion! (http://www.borland.com/linux/)
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