So Delphi didn't die after all...I guess that depends on what your definition of death is.
Remember a couple of years ago, Borland and Delphi were essentially dead.
Here is the play-by-play in case you missed it.
- Borland released a DotNet version of Delphi, which used Microsoft's Dotnet compiler behind the scenes. It tanked. Droves of developers moved to Visual Studio.
- Delphi developers screamed for an update to Delphi for Win32 instead and were very upset when they did not get it.
- Borland shipped a Linux version of Delphi (Kylix) that had rave reviews but never sold. That should be a case study for the stupidity of an open source business model. People downloaded the free version of Kylix and did not buy the commercial version. Borland tried to give it away in Delphi Studio but it didn't work.
- Borland, which was an IDE tool vendor, tried to embrace an open source IDE (Eclipse)as the core to their product.
Got all that? These foibles could be a doctoral thesis on how NOT to run a software business. As a result all of Borland's development tools were sold off/spun off into a new company.
The new company is called CodeGear (which I admit is a cool name). And Delphi Win32 is back in a new version. The DotNet and ASP versions were dropped.
But so what? Will this make any difference in the market - other than maintenance programming in Delphi Win32? I used to develop in Delphi before I embraced the future and cleverly manuevered my boss to switch to Visual Studio. I know Delphi is still popular in India and Europe, but most of the shops that I have seen in my career have already switched.