To me, the truth lies somewhere in between for Delphi. Delphi is a great WinForm language and its future is solid in that area. It will never be a Visual Studio sized product and large development shops will probably stop using it, but it will live on. People still work in FoxPro and it hasn't seen a good step forward in a decade or so. "VB Classic" will still be around 5+ years from now and it has been shuned by Microsoft which to me is another reason to avoid there product lines. Who wants to learn C# be 7-8 years down the road and C$ comes out and doesn't support your C# apps? Say what you will about Borland and there HUGE marketing screwups, they never abandond us to upgrade or die.
Developers are so caught up in the latest greatest. Personally, I will move when I see that C# can do it better and easier. I write code in C# for a few contract jobs, but I still perfer Delphi. Delphi isn't clunky like C# WinForms, it is blazing by comparison. I like a lot of the changes in C# from a programmer standpoint, but they are minor upgrades at best and case sensitivity is a huge annoyance for me. So when SQL Server finally moves off of TSQL and to C# (which I think will eventually happen... probably in 2020), internet based apps offer the same speed and dependability of WinForm apps or they finally write something meaningful in C# at Microsoft (Office, Window or Visual Studio) I will probably move to it myself. As of right now, no customer of mine asks... what is this interface written in? As of right now, our largest competitors write their apps in FoxPro, COBOL and FoxPro (yep two FoxPro apps). I haven't seen a C# app on the horizon and I don't think as a language it will bring any additional end user features that we don't or can't already provide. Interestingly, we are one of the few internet based apps in our market and we built ours years ago using Fat Client front ends with Thin Client architecture which is now all the rage in C# land. It will take a lot more code out there in .NET land before I move off of one of the greatest sources of free powerful code bases known to me. It is rare that I can't find some snippit of code for free in Delphi and pretty rare to find a good one in C#. It was and is a community of devotees that actually know how to code and whose philiosophy is very open. This is in strike contrast to Microsofts closed world. All IMO of course. __________________________________________________ Delphi-Talk mailing list -> Delphi-Talk@elists.org http://www.elists.org/mailman/listinfo/delphi-talk
