Turn: To the end of Delphi's Youth

Source: Internet Weekly Report: Delphi garden.

The price of $23 million seems to be a cheap sale. The price is only enough for a movie from Hollywood stars, and the cost of making a second-stream movie is not enough.
When I read the news online, I suddenly found a message: Borland Software has sold the codegear development tool department for $23 million. I suddenly realized that Delphi and C ++ Builder are not Borland.

Codegear is a subsidiary that was just separated from Borland two years ago. It is not very famous, but the products it sells are the most famous of Borland. this includes JBuilder, Java development tools, Delphi and C ++ builder. not long ago, codegear also created IDE development tools for PHP and Ruby.

Borland relied on IDE development tools turboc and Turbo Pascal to create its own brilliant legends, so that today we can all find the shadows of these two software in Chinese university classrooms.

However, Microsoft. NET development architecture gradually became mainstream, Borland's ide business began to lose its previous glory. particularly, the optimistic Java business has been hit by the eclipse Foundation Java IDE in the open source code camp. Borland's ide business revenue continues to decline. in this context, Borland began to give up ide services, including Delphi, and applied the development focus to the application lifecycle management (ALM) business.

So far, I still remember the classic phrase: Smart programmers learn Delphi and Real Programmers learn VC. later I chose to become a "real programmer", but Borland is definitely an IDE software company as important as Microsoft in my mind.

I am almost familiar with and love Borland's products. Although the usage is not as frequent as that of VC, I still bought related books, and install Borland's Delphi in my computer. This is probably the so-called "Borland complex ".

Borland could be another factor in the programmer's mind at that time-it had almost all the elements of legends. anders hejlsberg is one of them. in those years, this wizard not only developed the legendary PASCAL Compiler for Borland, but also created a substitute for the Delphi language for Pascal.

Borland and Its masters once put Microsoft into fear, so that Bill Gates had to drive a luxury bus station to dig people at the gate of Borland. with the efforts of the richest man, Anders hejlsberg was dug up by high salaries and developed C # To become Microsoft. NET architecture.

In fact, as early as a few years ago, Borland CEO Todd Nielson began clamoring to sell the IDE business, But Delphi was still shining, so he had not found a suitable buyer, as a result, people may wonder whether this is a commercial show played by Borland for a new company.

However, there are fewer and fewer news around delphi. In the past year, the only news that came into public view and mentioned Delphi name was Li Jun's pandatv virus, which was developed with Delphi.

Now Borland is finally about to sell Delphi together with other ide businesses, but the price of $23 million seems to be a cheap sale, which is only enough for a part of Hollywood stars, it seems that the cost of making a second-stream movie is not enough. but in the minds of many Delphi programmers, it is definitely much higher than this value, but what can they do?

Nowadays, more and more people are learning about computers through the Internet. The new generation of networks is better than those of the PC generation that emerged from Dos, it doesn't matter whether the code of a program is refined or not-the CPU speed has solved all the problems.

Now Delphi has gradually withdrawn from developers' sight. With the emergence of network application integration platforms such as Google, there are fewer and fewer people clicking on applications. maybe every day, application development will become an image assembly of a story that is far away.

I remember when I was in a college lecture two years ago, some students asked, "Do teachers have other development tools to choose from besides VC ?" At this time, I always said angrily: "Of course, there are Borland C ++ builder and Delphi !" But what should I do if another student asks me this question today?