In 1981, I started learning COBOL programming language followed by ANSI C. After a few years back started learning dBase III and developed several applications compiled with CLIPPER. Clipper is the compiler for dBase III. Later in 1995, I found Delphi, and I loved to work with that tool. It completely changed my software development skill. Anyway, let’s just refresh what Delphi was in the past and what it is now.
Today, Delphi is the most powerful software development tool used to build desktop, mobile, and different IoT software. It is up-to-date despite being developed in 1995. The reason for it is that it’s been regularly updated by Embarcadero. The latest version of Delphi is RAD Studio 11.1 which was released on March 15, 2022. It has new features including Many IDE Improvements. Extensive High DPI IDE quality, plus improved use of the IDE with Remote Desktop. It has been all the time and it is still a huge Delphi community comprising experienced engineers and developers.
Delphi was a revolutionary technology for Rapid Application Development (RAD) in the 90s and 2000s. It was a really unique tool that you could use for desktop development compared with this ugly Microsoft Visual Studio 6 version. That time it was too hard to start the development of an application with Visual Studio 6 compared with Delphi where you could just create the project, but the controls then run. And observe how the miracles started happening.
An interesting fact is that the Chief Architect behind Delphi was Anders Hejlsberg who was later hired by Microsoft to improve Visual Studio and he worked as a lead architect of C#. In 2003 Microsoft introduced .NET/C# and Visual Studio 2003 which I think it as Microsoft’s version of RAD studio, totally looking like Delphi. They spent a lot of money into advertising and marketing of these tools and the popularity of Delphi started decreasing and eventually .NET caught the leadership.
Fortunately, Delphi is rocking now. Embarcardero made it one of the best development tools for multi-devices and multi-platform solutions.