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Like so many other programmers of a certain age, I cut my teeth on Borland IDEs in the late 90s, building software for Windows 9x, which was a time when Borland

Like so many other programmers of a certain age, I cut my teeth on Borland IDEs in the late 90s, building software for Windows 9x, which was a time when Borland was absolutely crushing it with tools that were light years ahead of Microsoft's own offerings at the time. It makes me so sad that Borland tools are squarely in the dustbin of history, and are now maintained almost exclusively for legacy customers. I would love to read some kind of retrospective (a book, a series of blogs, etc) on the downfall of Borland and what exact business circumstances led to its irrelevance.

dt3ft 3y ago
As someone who got started with Delphi 2.0, I can tell you what killed it for me: the release of .net and visual studio. I looked back a few times, but always went back to visual studio.
tabtab 3y ago
There's always Lazarus, a more or less Delphi clone. Being open-source, it's harder for a greedy or incompetent vendor to yank the carpet out from under your org. I've considered abandoning web-dev for Delphi/Lazarus. The web is a lousy fit for CRUD/GUI. React etc. are Spruce Gooses. (We need a dynamic over-http markup standard, kind of like a friendlier and XML version of QML.)
- dt3ft 3y ago
  I’m considering this too. I tried writing some test using react testing library and jest, but in order to debug my test and see actual html that the test was rendering, turns out you either have to log the output or use jest-preview which is in alpha to say the least. Documentation, getting started… all of it is so immature and working half-ways that I can’t help but wonder what are we doing with our lives?
lelanthran 3y ago
There was a critical time in the industry, if your tech didn't run on Linux it was dead in the water. Delphi and C++ builder should have been ported to Linux and the BSDs by 2001. They hitched their wagon to Windows and are now almost a footnote in history. Come to think of it, almost all Windows only applications faced the same fate.
- comrad 3y ago
  Well, they did in 2003. Kylix was the attempt to offer Delphi 6 RAD for Linux. https://wiki.freepascal.org/Kylix https://wiki.freepascal.org/Kylix
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    I don't remember why, but kylix didn't work for me. And C++ builder was never ported.
- mellosouls 3y ago
  There was a critical time in the industry, if your tech didn't run on Linux it was dead in the water. No. I can't remember that ever being a thing, I've no idea where you got that idea from.
  - eitland 3y ago
    I guess it was more Mac than Linux, and it happened around peak Rails.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Except outside wealthy countries, macOS doesn't really matter and has about 20% market share across the globe.
      - eitland 3y ago
        True, and on a global scale 20% is even a much larger percentage than I would have expected. My point however is that when I started working in IT I was the only one at the places where I worked who used something other than Windows whenever possible and also advocated for it. Then there was a change. And as far as I can see that change started with screencasting and as far as I saw, the first widely popular screencasts that existed was Rails, created mostly by 37 Signals (now Basecamp I guess) and other Rails devs/enthusiasts. I might be wrong about this but I feel fairly certain these guys drove a lot of the change in peoples and organisations attitude to alternative OSes. Also: for a long time it seemed Linux adoption was also lower in less wealthy countries as using unlicensed versions of Windows are much more accepted there.
snarfy 3y ago
Microsoft hired Anders to stop working on Delphi and work on C# instead. That was the beginning of the end.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  The shittiest etiology for an apocalypse possible XD
- pjmlp 3y ago
  That isn't how it went down, Anders got fed up with Borland management and decided to finally accept the offers from ex-Borland folks to join Microsoft. When he joined, his first project was being part of J++.
  - fm77 3y ago
    I have read that quite often here and there and while the management at Borland certainly was a pain, I don’t think that for Anders Hejlsberg this was the main reason to leave. I believe (and I have no prove) that during development of Delphi V1.0 Anders realized that his „baby", the source code of the compiler core written in 16-bit assembly became worthless. The new 32-bit compiler for Delphi V2.0 was written in C by Peter Sollich. Anders new role at Borland was just to be an architect / manager / teamleader / whatever… He could have contributed to the new 32-bit compiler in a way he does today to TypeScript, but for whatever reason he didn’t wanted to. That, along with the Borland management and the nice $$$ signing bonus offered at Microsoft made him leave. Again, that's just my take. Peter Sollich left Borland I think in 1998 in order to join Microsoft, to this day he is in the C#/.net team. https://youtu.be/LPcjSdob9AA https://youtu.be/LPcjSdob9AA And I still wonder who has written Turbo Pascal for Mac in 1985/86…
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      It is the official reason told by himself in this interview, "Anders Hejlsberg: A craftsman of computer language" https://behindthetech.libsynpro.com/001-anders-hejlsberg-a-craftsman-of-computer-language https://behindthetech.libsynpro.com/001-anders-hejlsberg-a-c... Now if you want to tell he makes that up, I dunno.
robocat 3y ago
Crappy features - features that developers didn't want and didn't need. Management driven? The headline features on every release were just rubbish that you didn't care about or never used - very few headline features held up over time. This started in Turbo Pascal days - remember OWL? Of course they were struggling to compete with Gorilla Microsoft, but Delphi had a huge community, commercial components, and most components were source available (C# was wayyyy behind on that I thought). Borland fucked up, and after that it was dead and sold. 64-bit super was released years late, and the IDE still ran 32-bit (slow and crashy on high-end machines). I would summarise it as lack of 'taste' for what developers want. Microsoft later followed the same path: Microsoft had the intense love of many developers but has squandered that love over the years. Balmer's "developers, developers, developers" rant was actually brilliant (a perhaps is why it is so memorable).
yobbo 3y ago
Probably technology shift; the apps that used to be delphi/visual basic became web apps in java, dotnet, or php, and those were free.

dt3ft 3y ago

As someone who got started with Delphi 2.0, I can tell you what killed it for me: the release of .net and visual studio. I looked back a few times, but always went back to visual studio.

tabtab 3y ago

There's always Lazarus, a more or less Delphi clone. Being open-source, it's harder for a greedy or incompetent vendor to yank the carpet out from under your org. I've considered abandoning web-dev for Delphi/Lazarus. The web is a lousy fit for CRUD/GUI. React etc. are Spruce Gooses. (We need a dynamic over-http markup standard, kind of like a friendlier and XML version of QML.)

dt3ft 3y ago
I’m considering this too. I tried writing some test using react testing library and jest, but in order to debug my test and see actual html that the test was rendering, turns out you either have to log the output or use jest-preview which is in alpha to say the least. Documentation, getting started… all of it is so immature and working half-ways that I can’t help but wonder what are we doing with our lives?

lelanthran 3y ago

There was a critical time in the industry, if your tech didn't run on Linux it was dead in the water. Delphi and C++ builder should have been ported to Linux and the BSDs by 2001. They hitched their wagon to Windows and are now almost a footnote in history. Come to think of it, almost all Windows only applications faced the same fate.

comrad 3y ago
Well, they did in 2003. Kylix was the attempt to offer Delphi 6 RAD for Linux. https://wiki.freepascal.org/Kylix https://wiki.freepascal.org/Kylix
- lelanthran 3y ago
  I don't remember why, but kylix didn't work for me. And C++ builder was never ported.
mellosouls 3y ago
There was a critical time in the industry, if your tech didn't run on Linux it was dead in the water. No. I can't remember that ever being a thing, I've no idea where you got that idea from.
- eitland 3y ago
  I guess it was more Mac than Linux, and it happened around peak Rails.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Except outside wealthy countries, macOS doesn't really matter and has about 20% market share across the globe.
    - eitland 3y ago
      True, and on a global scale 20% is even a much larger percentage than I would have expected. My point however is that when I started working in IT I was the only one at the places where I worked who used something other than Windows whenever possible and also advocated for it. Then there was a change. And as far as I can see that change started with screencasting and as far as I saw, the first widely popular screencasts that existed was Rails, created mostly by 37 Signals (now Basecamp I guess) and other Rails devs/enthusiasts. I might be wrong about this but I feel fairly certain these guys drove a lot of the change in peoples and organisations attitude to alternative OSes. Also: for a long time it seemed Linux adoption was also lower in less wealthy countries as using unlicensed versions of Windows are much more accepted there.

snarfy 3y ago

Microsoft hired Anders to stop working on Delphi and work on C# instead. That was the beginning of the end.

shrimp_emoji 3y ago
The shittiest etiology for an apocalypse possible XD
pjmlp 3y ago
That isn't how it went down, Anders got fed up with Borland management and decided to finally accept the offers from ex-Borland folks to join Microsoft. When he joined, his first project was being part of J++.
- fm77 3y ago
  I have read that quite often here and there and while the management at Borland certainly was a pain, I don’t think that for Anders Hejlsberg this was the main reason to leave. I believe (and I have no prove) that during development of Delphi V1.0 Anders realized that his „baby", the source code of the compiler core written in 16-bit assembly became worthless. The new 32-bit compiler for Delphi V2.0 was written in C by Peter Sollich. Anders new role at Borland was just to be an architect / manager / teamleader / whatever… He could have contributed to the new 32-bit compiler in a way he does today to TypeScript, but for whatever reason he didn’t wanted to. That, along with the Borland management and the nice $$$ signing bonus offered at Microsoft made him leave. Again, that's just my take. Peter Sollich left Borland I think in 1998 in order to join Microsoft, to this day he is in the C#/.net team. https://youtu.be/LPcjSdob9AA https://youtu.be/LPcjSdob9AA And I still wonder who has written Turbo Pascal for Mac in 1985/86…
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    It is the official reason told by himself in this interview, "Anders Hejlsberg: A craftsman of computer language" https://behindthetech.libsynpro.com/001-anders-hejlsberg-a-craftsman-of-computer-language https://behindthetech.libsynpro.com/001-anders-hejlsberg-a-c... Now if you want to tell he makes that up, I dunno.

robocat 3y ago

Crappy features - features that developers didn't want and didn't need. Management driven? The headline features on every release were just rubbish that you didn't care about or never used - very few headline features held up over time. This started in Turbo Pascal days - remember OWL? Of course they were struggling to compete with Gorilla Microsoft, but Delphi had a huge community, commercial components, and most components were source available (C# was wayyyy behind on that I thought). Borland fucked up, and after that it was dead and sold. 64-bit super was released years late, and the IDE still ran 32-bit (slow and crashy on high-end machines). I would summarise it as lack of 'taste' for what developers want. Microsoft later followed the same path: Microsoft had the intense love of many developers but has squandered that love over the years. Balmer's "developers, developers, developers" rant was actually brilliant (a perhaps is why it is so memorable).

yobbo 3y ago

Probably technology shift; the apps that used to be delphi/visual basic became web apps in java, dotnet, or php, and those were free.