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Comment by trentmb | Hacker News Reader

Or that you have to drop $1,405.00 [0] to get a 'professional' environment.

[0] https://www.embarcadero.com/app-development-tools-store/delp...

That's the problem. You can't sell programming tools any more. Everyone expects them to be free. Walter Bright, the designer of D and one of the first good C++, is on here, and has mentioned that before.

So programming tools come from some source that has an agenda. Oracle. Microsoft. Google. Even Mozilla.

I don't mind paying for my tools. I have a ST2 license, and will be buying an ST3 upgrade license when it's time.

It's just that $1.5k is hard to justify for a single language environment/compiler. VS2015 Pro is $499, while a yearly Pro/MSDN subscriptions is $1,199/year.

That depends. As long as I've been in the game there have been relatively expensive options. Back in the day I kept hearing about SmallTalk and I saw the price tag in an ad in Dr.Dobbs. Sticker shock! But "serious" pricing is still alive today. Check http://www.lispworks.com/buy/prices-1c.html for instance.

For some languages, lower prices won't significantly increases sales volume. And 1.5K is not a barrier if it's your bread and butter language. It's in the same ballpark as a developer machine.

The problem is, to gain traction these days, you target the developers, give them enough resources to work on something in their spare time, and hope they have enough influence to make their company switch from language A to language B.

Charging the developer, before they even have a chance to try the language out, when there are other free options available, means they'll never even give the language a chance.

I agree with you, but I also still agree with me:

Making Delphi or Common Lisp the next hotness is pretty much a lost cause, and has been for a long time. The people using those things tend to be heavily invested in them, and still making money. If you're not making enough money to spend US1.5K on your primary tool then you're not really making money.

Most of the people who balk at $1,500 will probably still pick the free option rather than pay $19.99.

Even though there are good free options (in the case of common lisp there are multiple good free options), there's still no gaining of traction.

So these companies charging money have defined their target market as people already using the language professionally, and they've found a price point that lets them stay in business and provide quality tooling (specialized IDEs, debuggers, GUI frameworks, et al). If they lowered their prices to $19.99, rather than attract loads of new mindshare they'd simply go out of business.

I pay for all the intellij products. Not only are they on a different level than anything else, they're not even expensive.

Nonsense. I'd gladly pay $1400 for a development environment if it made my job as a developer easier or better. My recollection is that Delphi (and its various owners) lost their way, not that people suddenly rejected Delphi's price point.

As someone who works with Delphi and C++Builder for a job… yeah, it's the single shittiest development environment ever conceived by man, and they charge exorbitant prices for it.

It's actually gotten so bad that my company is opting to migrate to C# for future development, in spite of our long investment in Delphi.

I wouldn't say that the IDE is shit, but it certainly isn't as good as VS, what issues do you encounter to make you say that?

I stopped developing in Delphi in 2007, and even by then the IDE was starting to drift. The Delphi 5/6 IDE was great - much like Lazarus. The Delphi 7... well, I think it was okay, but I didn't really ever use it. Everything after that, started to make me face palm.

I did like Kylix. I messed about with it and I remember going to watch the UK demo of it by Charlie Calvert in the Polish Centre in London circa 2001/2002. I had a licensed version of 1.0 (and used the Betas as my company at the time was sub contracted by Borland UK, so we got perks like being NDA'd.) That they got the IDE to work was cool. But CLX really messed up the direction.

By the time they did the .Net version, the writing was on the wall.... that bug in the compiler that tied the compiler down in a way that made the 2.0 framework unhappy to run 1.1 binaries, that really told me all I wanted to know. I transitioned to .Net and C#.

- C++Builder: Compiler ICEs regularly

- Both: No undo in the UI builder

- Delphi: There are about 3 different ways of adding an existing file to a project. They seem to differ in how they track dependencies.

- Both: Project files periodically get corrupted.

- Both: Renaming a control on a form by only changing case causes some references to the control not to be updated.

- Both: No customizable keybindings

- C++Builder (might be true with Delphi too): The debugger periodically crashes.

- C++Builder: Sometimes the project fails to build and gives a bunch of errors in system headers. The solution? Close the IDE and open it again.

Those are just the big ones. There are a million tiny annoyances that add up to be very frustrating.

Yeah, they are really doing it wrong IMO. But it is what it is at this point.

gets even worse if you want to develop for iOS/Android since you have to buy windows first

And no Linux support (yet).

Linux is well supported by Lazarus and FreePascal!

I think the parent meant Delphi

I believe it still comes with a version of Kylix. But sadly, yes, "no linux support" is pretty accurate, mostly because it sucks badly.

Kylix didn't suck per se - the CLX sucked. 2 frameworks that were almost, but not entirely, compatible was a big mistake. Borland were just too clever for their own good. They didn't understand that Linux is a moving target and not being able to keep up to date with the various libs and toolkits killed the product. Try getting Kylix 1.0 to run now... it's not a trivial task. It's painful. I could more than likely install Delphi 2.0 (first 32 bit version, though 3.0 would be "safer" as 2.0 was a bit of a mis-mash) even now on Windows (probably 1.0 on a system that still supported WOW for 16bit apps.)

Yes, I had read maybe around a year ago on their site that Embarcadero had plans to bring out a Delphi version with Linux support. Not sure what happened to that, and also now that they have been bought by Idera (which I only saw from the recent thread here about Modern Object Pascal).

They stated plans for Linux server support in Delphi but no GUI apps for Linux.

Thanks. An example of poor business thinking, IMO. That's basically putting on blinkers and saying "oh, Linux is only for servers", which is pure bull - unless they had some valid technical reason for not wanting to support GUI apps on Linux.

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