Delphi's 25th Birthday
community.idera.com
community.idera.com
Meanwhile, the former creator of Delphi had left for MS and created C# that at the time was already beating Delphi at its own game.
By the mid 2000s Delphi was already dead in the water: poor unicode support, no 64-bit compiler, and a language that hadn't innovated much since the 90s.
It's a shame, really. Delphi in the 90s was on its way to rule the world. Only then suddenly it wasn't.
RIP. You were great once.
It has all the downsides of service based DB without all the advantages of file based DB.
And the documentation is way below average, backwards compatibility is a joke.
Not to mention the 3rd party software had to design their own(horribly bad) way to handle geometry in firebird... and they keep transactions open forever - and bloody firebird prior to 2.5 had no way to drop the dead connections.
I also remember a coworker had been approached by MS to work on the DotNet marketing campaign and he declined, as it was seen as kind of a failure with a very uncertain future. Hindsight is 20/20.
edit: personally I have found memories of Delphi3.
It's worth noting that Kylix's failure to take off had a lot more to do with Borland's variously stupid, obnoxious and immoral business decisions than it had to do with the upheaval in the Linux desktop world. It was a strong enough concept for a product, and the base technology was implemented well enough, that all they had to do was not screw it up... and guess what they did?
All these years later I remember saying "fuck it" when Borland decided to wrap up some important bug fixes into the (full price) upgrade for Kylix, rather than just giving them to existing users. The smug uselessness of the one or two Borland employees who liaised with the community online has kind of stuck in my memory as well. The technology deserved to survive but the company sure didn't.
In a bout of late 90s nostalgia, I convinced my then-employer in 2011 to buy a license for the professional version of Delphi for a software project I was doing, and I was just absolutely shocked about how far it had fallen behind the curve. It seemed that attempting to support a modern tech ecosystem while maintaining some semblance of backwards-compatibility was giving it the worst of both worlds. Add to that enterprise bloat.
I don't know what it's like today, but I sincerely hope that someone will get it back on the right track (or has already done so, as I haven't retried since my experience in 2011).
Now when I think "substantial investment" and then look at your website, what comes to mind is "lock-in nightmare". Sorry, not trying to be cruel, just wanting to give you an honest opinion.
I mean: Picture a development team pouring real efforts into development work, then training end-users to use the final product. That represents a real investment. And that investment is then locked into a vendor, where it's unclear what will happen to that investment if the vendor should decide to change the pricing model or go out of business.
I guess the original Delphi did have that problem, but the world was just a different one in the late 90s. You bought your copy of Delphi on a CD with a perpetual license, and an organization that had lock-in to Windows NT software would see it as a perfectly viable path, to keep those Windows NT systems running for the next 20 years to recoup any investment in software. Plus Microsoft was actually pretty good (and continues to be good) at establishing backwards-compatibility.
Cloud tooling definitely has the problem that vendor financial troubles = a sudden "our incredible journey" and poof, your app is gone. That's something client side apps don't have to worry about.
2020 Delphi supports five platforms, has 64-bit compilers everywhere, has modern language features, interoperates with C++ through C++Builder, and more. In the past few years especially, we've* seen both a lot of work on it, and increasing interest in using it.
It's modern, and used more widely than one might realise.
* "We've": This is a personal HN account but I work on Delphi and C++Builder.
If we take "rapid application development" out of its trademarked context, applying just its common-sense meaning, and applying it to the year 2020, then the modern tech ecosystem that one would want to integrate with is clearly not C++, but rather maybe JavaScript & the browser ecosystem, Python, and low-overhead JVM langauges like Scala or Groovy.
The next thing that immediately jumps out at me is that the form designer is still using pixel-based positioning, instead of layout managers and units of length that we know from html, like em (fontsize-based), or vh/vw (percent of view-height/view-width), etc.
I was trying to research these things more extensively just now, but giving you my name, street address, company, phone number, and then "Error: Field required: Yes, I would like to receive marketing communications" for downloading the COMMUNITY edition? Come on! Enterprise bloat: Check.
* Hit the installer and switched windows, to let the installer work in the background.
* Installer mysteriously gone.
* Tried to run the programme, and it took some digging to understand that the product seems to be in a half-installed state.
* Re-run the installer. This time, keeping the installer in the foreground. Now it works.
* Started Delphi.
* Dropped a button in the form designer to start playing around.
* Oh gosh. Form designer still using pixel-based layouts.
* Deleted the button.
* Doing some Googling to figure out how to do layout managers, and found an interesting youtube tutorial on something called TGridLayout.
* Dropped a TGridLayout on my form.
* Form Designer now caught in an infinite loop bringing up an Error modal that says "Control TButton($17EE2200) has no parent window. Path: ~TButton($17EE2200)".
Thanks Delphi! See you again, another 10 years from now.
> Oh gosh. Form designer still using pixel-based layouts.
If you build a desktop app, you'll get pixel-based layouts, because that's how Windows works. It is fully high DPI enabled and scalable, so it's not accurate really to call the units pixels. Call them design units or similar.
As you noted there are various layout tools, from containers with various flow behaviours, through to anchors and padding.
What kind of modern language features has it gained?
Also it's open source, so when you are writing code you can actually navigate to the underlying sources and step into everything with the debugger if you want.
Finally, it comes with library support for so much more than Delphi, including Google APIs, FreeType, Cairo, Fuse, and so on.
Oh and it can also build to Java byte code and run in a Java JVM, also to Android.
Did I mention it's free and open source under active development?
Not just the compiler. If the board has enough juice one can run the entire IDE itself on it, therefore developing on the same iron. I've tried Lazarus on old H3 based NanoPIs and slowness aside (microSD, years old board, 1G RAM) it was perfectly usable to write, compile and run code on the same board. Not an ideal condition, still speaks a lot on why Open Source is great. I wish the IDE supported more languages and compilers though, and even a basic port of the LCL and debugger to them would be a huge achievement.
https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ is made by the Free Pascal team, that's the "official" version. It has precompiled binaries to download https://www.lazarus-ide.org/index.php?page=about
https://www.getlazarus.org/ is a different version (but not sure by how much), using download scripts https://www.getlazarus.org/about/
No, it is less than mediocre. It has not kept up at any sufficient pace to other languages and environments. Just a small excerpt because I don't have the nerve to write an exhaustive critique: bignum, first-class functions, generators, lazy lists, lexical scope, macros, namespaces. Single window in Lazarus requires recompilation that errors out in CheckLst.pas instead of being a preference somewhere in a menu.
The other things I understand though. I much prefer Pascal syntax and compilation time, but I have started reaching for c++ these days
Simple begin/end should create a scope, cf. { … } in ES6 or Perl. Instead, to make it work, the programmer has to nest named procedures.
> Namespaces have been supported since 3.0.
Sorry, I did not notice. Apparently it's been available for 5 years, but the standard library or other popular libraries did not adopt the feature.
I bloody loved that language, but all of the components had serious errors that resulted in crashes. To make it worse, they are their own dog food, meaning the IDE itself crashed all the time.
This wouldn’t have been so bad, but then VB5 happened, which was much, much worse semantically but absolutely rock solid.
Of course, then C# happened, but devs like me had already left the ecosystem. (And the less said about all that bundled cruft the better.)
Delphi 1 was a mess. Delphi 2 was rock solid. Delphi 3 was a buggy mess. Delphi 4 kind of recovered things but was never as good as Delphi 2. By this point we'd figured out the pattern and skipped Delphi 5, if I recall correctly.
1 was 16 bits only. 2 turn to 32 bits AFAIK.
D4 had bugs in its COM code. In 2000 I worked at a Dotcom (homedirectory.com) and we used a D4 COM search component running in SQL Server 6.5. It used to crash when the CPU load went above 5%. I guessed it was D4, recompiled under D5 and that fixed it.
Microsoft as part of its settlement to Borland over the employee poaching (including AH) provided technical info that let D5 generate reliable COM code.
So, it seems that Delphi is alive, kicking serious butt and making some companies loads of money, developing beautiful modern enterprise apps.
I, like many others, got my start in programming with early Delphi versions in school - Delphi 3 truly was my first love and I recognize the splash screens that are currently on display at https://delphi.embarcadero.com up until Delphi 2007, but 6 and 7 give me a warm, fuzzy feeling. We parted ways in the mid-2000s but I can honestly say, I never got back that feeling of joy and love for a language and a programming environment that I had for Pascal and Delphi (then again, I never had to deal with any messy legacy projects and component issues back then which surely drove some developers nuts).
Anyway... seeing that Delphi is still alive and watching a few YouTube videos about the new features it got over the last 10 years, including the stunning cross-platform development options for Android, iOS, web and PC (and apparently you can integrate with Sencha ExtJS, although I'm still unclear on how), I downloaded the free Delphi Community Edition - which is GREAT - and knocked out a beautiful little client-server app for a PoC over a weekend. Could hardly fathom the adrenaline rush I got from that...
I'm seriously considering putting in a purchase request for the Architect edition now... buying that at full price used to be a dream of teenage me and I think it's not even as expensive as I remember :-) Can't really justify it but then again, it's a chicken-egg problem and you've got to start somewhere.
You probably can't say that out loud, it being heresy and whatnot, but I could imagine that even now, schools could get more students to develop a love for programming on a wider and more versatile scale with Delphi Community Edition rather than Java or Python... There I said it, pls don't kill.
I'm one of the product managers who works on Delphi today (together with Marco Cantù. I actually work on C++Builder, Delphi's sister product.) I am really happy to hear that.
Your question about Sencha: we recommend using Sencha for web front-ends, and we have a server product written with Delphi for creating REST services or converting your desktop apps to REST-based backends, called RAD Server.
> I could imagine that even now, schools could get more students to develop a love for programming on a wider and more versatile scale with Delphi Community Edition rather than Java or Python... There I said it, pls don't kill.
It's widely used in non-English-speaking countries for education today. I too expect it would be much better than Java for learning.
Go ahead, make Embarcadero sales department happy. Delphi has not evolved substantially in years. They pretty much keep the product on life support, milking whatever they can from support contracts. I don't see a reason to invest your money and time in Delphi unless you have a legacy application to support.
I'll repeat that: You can install a hundred times if you need. You do not have to buy or have a current subscription to install.
The license server counts installations and flags for verification after a certain number because it's quite common for people to install far more times (ie, for more people) than they actually bought. All that is required after you install a one-person license enough times to trigger the server asking questions is to contact us and let us know you really are using it legally. Then you're good to go.
https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/product-editions
I can't see students not needing DB access let alone 'early stage startups', without TDataSet et al, it would be effectively useless/worthless. (we're STILL using D5 where I work)
that is ridiculous in 2020
and you only get that with the "enterprise edition"
"professional" only gets you embeded and localhost DB ?!?
I still have my old separate Firedac licence for an old project i support, but anybody new coming to this mess will just have a good lough and move on.
You can use open source libraries like Zeoslib (https://zeoslib.sourceforge.io/) or mORMot (https://synopse.info/fossil/wiki?name=SQLite3+Framework).
I suppose it is not easy for you (as a tool supplier).
I can't find the new pricing on the website (everything is free trial / request a quote) but I remember the last time I saw pricing it was so much that I opted to kill the one Delphi-made product I had rather than upgrade. I'm using Xojo instead for my cross-platform RAD development now.
From a technical perspective, it was my favorite attempt to tame a often horrible mess of half-baked database design and ad-hoc solutions -- you can do spaghetti code in every language, but the Delphi apps I saw were usually a bit better than their FoxPro/Access/FileMaker/VB equivalents.
Didn't want to imply that Delphi wasn't/wouldn't be great for the other ends of the spectrum, too.
A lot of audio software and VST plugins, in the early days, was done in Delphi.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130121065235/http://www.sonics...
We love making our software with Delphi since 2002 and it always provided us with a rock solid foundation until today.
In those 18 years (>2.000.000 downloads) we never had a single critical failure. Ever.
The rapid prototyping capabilities help us to design and _experience_ user interface in no time.
Firemonkey allows us to create Mac & Windows multi-plaform software from a single code base.
As a commercial software company that needs the job done reliable and efficient, Delphi just never disappointed us.
Yes, we know there is #C, .NET, Java but we see no need to change something that just works so well.
Cheers, Bartels Media from Germany
C, C++, Ada, Pascal, Basic, Oberon compilers for embedded market, in many cases, certificed compilers.
Commercial UNIX, mainframe and Windows compilers (VS Community doesn't cover everything) are still a separate product.
Sony, Nintendo, MS SDKs for their game consoles.
HPC compilers, yeah you can try with clang and gcc, but if you are doing top research, then IBM, Intel, CodePlay, PGI compilers is what you want to be using on that hardware, and they cost pennies versus the total hardware cost.
And even in what concerns Apple, I would consider that XCode is somehow included in Apple^s hardware price.
Are you writing general purpose, portable code code? You'd rather not be locked in to a specific vendor's compiler.
Are you working in embedded systems? Your code is probably hardware-specific, at least to some degree. You probably aren't going to switch CPUs very often. You probably are never going to switch CPU families. You also probably are never going to upgrade the compiler, still less switch to a different vendor's compiler. So if you aren't going to do that anyway, you don't worry much about a one-vendor-only compiler or language.
I think it's a similar story in HPC. You're constrained by your hardware. You get the best compiler for that setup. That means it's hard to change compilers? It's even harder to change your hardware, so you didn't add much of a constraint.
You could argue Microsoft is an exception and them opening .NET shows the end of that era though.
The "open source or nothing" mentality might change in future. It means there's not much market for developer tools, so everything gets hacked together out of random "frameworks" found on GitHub that are here today, gone tomorrow when the bored developer at Netflix or Google gets their desired promo and moves on. There's no real planning or design, just whatever random stuff tech firms throw in the mix as a side effect of other projects, which is why HTML has virtual reality support but no table or spreadsheet view worth a damn.
Which kind of information-leaks that either VR is hype noone really cares about, or that none of said committees (with attendant lumbering bureaucracy) have really noticed it yet. Wait, I just described the same thing two different ways.
But yeah, no, it would not do to have The Web℠ Platformᴳ, errrrr, "excel". :P
On the other hand, let's not kid ourselves. The web wasn't actually built by making a melting pot of diverse ideas with an evolutionary process to select between them. The web has always been controlled by one dominant company, and the stuff that gets added (or not) reflects the agenda of their internal committees. The web went from being controlled very, very briefly by Tim BL to being controlled by Netscape who added forms, cookies, JavaScript, CSS etc. Then to Microsoft, who added a pile of other stuff and then froze development for years whilst Mozilla tried to get off the ground.
Mozilla added relatively little to the web given the resources invested into Firefox; virtually all their energy went into trying to fix their own architectural mis-fires. Then WebKit came along and very briefly Apple was in charge. That era didn't last long until Google came along and took the crown, which they've had ever since. Unlike Apple and Mozilla, Google actually have added a lot of stuff to the web platform but it reflects a consumer driven agenda. Hence WebVR, WebRTC etc.
To the extent the other players exerted any influence on the Chrome team during this time it's - in my view - been mostly negative. Mozilla lost to Chrome because their technical choices just weren't that good, but they've continued to exercise outsized influence on decision making despite dwindling market share.
Additionally the lack of any real support for libraries or dependencies in the web platform means many of the new APIs added to HTML can't be challenged by competitors. WebAudio sucks but nobody can make a better one because of the sandbox.
In the end the web isn't really the result of ad-hoc coordination so much as a dysfunctional lurching tug-of-war between different groups of engineers who all work down the road from each other at different firms in California (with a detour through Seattle).
Maybe I should get into it again, not sure. :-D
https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter
Lazarus and FreePascal are great, but they aren't 100% Delphi.
Ok I kinda find out.
https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ is made by the Free Pascal team, that's the "official" version. It has precompiled binaries to download https://www.lazarus-ide.org/index.php?page=about
https://www.getlazarus.org/ is a different version (but not sure by how much), using download scripts https://www.getlazarus.org/about/
There's been more and more talk about moving to something else, but a complete rewrite would likely be a death sentence so...
Still, for whipping up some quick GUI that does file IO and/or DB stuff there's not much that beats it. Though having to consume REST APIs or similar newfangled things is not such a pleasurable experience.
In addition, the built-in JSON stuff is also tedious to use, I found SecureBlackBox's variant with some class helper to provide basic XPath-like access to be quite a lot more ergonomic to use. But JSON still feels like an impedance mismatch.
At the time we coded on a Sperry Univac 1100 system at varsity and it took bloody ages to compile/debug/run programs.
When I got a loaner PC and a copy of Turbo Pascal it was so amazing and fast.
I'm going to guess that the staff didn't have to use those terminals, only the students did.
1. No Garbage Collector. While some understanding of object lifetime is required, the constant need to manage allocation and de-allocation of objects takes a lot of energy away from the writing code.
2. Naming variables in a separate Var block. This is really cumbersome and detracts from the development experience. This was somewhat fixed in Delphi 10.3 which was released in 2018 or rather 23 years after the first Delphi version.
3. The unrealistic pricing of Delphi. The high cost of licensing has throughout the times meant that other programming languages have been chosen on this fact alone.
If (1) and (3) could be fixed then Delphi might stand a chance to gain significant market share.
1 sounds like you need to get experience on more platforms though. Maybe try to work on a memory restricted platform using a GC language and see how it fucks you over. Anyway, look beyond the javascript "ecosystem".
And while 2 can be mildly annoying, there's a reason Borland compilers are so fast, and that's the somewhat restricted syntax of the language.
> 1. No Garbage Collector
I somewhat disagree. Strings are refcounted which removes 90% of the potential pain. Interfaces could be used to ensure objects were freed at end of function scope. Full GC would have ruined Delphi IMHO (if you wanted GC you used VB, or Java which had downsides related to it’s GC. Delphi Apps worked great on low resource machines).
If Borland's management hadn't messed up, .NET and Java probably would never had taken off on PC world.
Most university students in Portugal during the 90's would also gladly accept Microsoft job offers.
I always find ironic that the companies that sold out to Microsoft are always the victims, the poor souls never did anything wrong.
I'm currently maintaining and extending a major proptech application with 1.3 million loc of Delphi (XE7). Not so long ago the firm bought another firm with its own a 1.3 million loc of D7 code! There's still a lot of Delphi code about.
Its still avaliable: http://www.madtracker.org/main.php
Thread talking about it: https://www.madtracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=180&sid=7df...
So you could basically do anything with it, all the time not worrying about aligning buttons on a form because it was piss easy.
My dad used OS/2 for a long time :)
Delphi is alive over here, even if only on corporations with big pockets.
I ought to Pascal being introduced to systems programming and OOP in a much saner way than other alternatives.
I used Delphi at my first job, while studying in the university, where we were taught Java (and C and other languages), what I really disliked were Java's getters and setters, which seemed like a clunky and pointless verbosity, compared to the properties in Delphi.
Python has the @property decorator, I wish other languages had something like that. Qt also has foo() and setFoo(), instead of getFoo(), which makes sense, and reduces verbosity and visual clutter.
Another component is Oracle 9i running on Itanium HPUX. At least it works fine.
It's mostly a dead language. Didn't even hit the 2019 developer survey on stack overflow. My university never used it and no company I've ever been in has used it and I've been with 4 already.
There many lists like these with many new apps popping up.
Could you elaborate on that? I'm actually interested in procuring Delphi commercially after getting to know the free Community edition recently and I'd like to avoid any licensing pitfalls if possible. I can't really imagine how they would stop you from installing a properly licensed and purchased software but if they do, I'd be curious to know how to avoid running into that situation. Thanks.
This was a hot topic at their forums. Sorry, can't locate that now, but here is a post of somebody who bumped into this:
https://community.idera.com/developer-tools/general-developm...
It's pretty customer hostile if you ask me.
Straight risk avoidance advice:- You need to install the Delphi software on a completely dedicated system that you never plan to reset; and image back it up; and hopefully that will work. And install the software on a Virtual Machine and back that up. And/Or always renew the subscription if the new features make any sense to you or not. Do these things and you will be Ok.
My experience was:
I am programming as a hobby; even so - I don't like to commit a huge amount of my personal evening and weekend time to software with a toy license that restricts what I can do with it.
In 2017; Delphi started to look good again; I got the starter edition; really liked it; found it useful; thought why not support the developers; and upgraded to the commercial version at 10.1; also purchased a number of really nice plugins; (used Delphi in my spare time project for a year or so); very happy with the results.
Stopped using it for a while; because my project was finished. I also messed around with Delphi on a couple of my systems while playing with mobile apps and Macs; found it much less useful there.
My main focus is windows desktop not mobile; I was playing around with new pre-release versions of Windows; I had to reset those systems when they got out of hand.
I ended up unable to reinstall 10.2 (my third party components need that.) So I contacted support; and was knocked back; with a cold email.
I guess the licensing methodology may be legal (not a lawyer); but it does not seem fair or reasonable to me.
I have written a lot of Delphi in projects I can not rebuild; I own several third party components that are now useless to me. The current version is I think 10.3; I was subscribed up until 10.2.
Other feedback
I think Delphi is good for Windows desktop programming; especially for GUIs that connect to data bases; nothing like as exceptional for Mac or Mobile. With respect to those databases you used to need the Enterprise version to use MySQL etc; as the lower license agreement did forbid the use of database services; only allowing local data.
I ended up spending many enjoyable hours learning or re-remembering how the database connections worked in Delphi; and figuring out how my third party components all worked; then enjoyed gluing them all together in my programs.
Where I am now: I could purchase the latest Delphi and update all my components; for no real benefit to my project; or I can learn to like .NET core and get translating. The third party components I used; are also available for .NET; and there are thousands of open source packages for .NET as well. Not so sure about the GUI.
How do they stop you?:
To be completely clear; because that company likes to be fuzzy about it; I have a valid license; serial number; invoice; and online account (which I really need to delete); I am blocked because I re-installed the software too many times. Where too many; was not very many; and was not even concurrent.
All the best with your project.
What was not great was Pascal, especially their version of it. It didn't even have a published formal grammar (as of Delphi 5), as I found out when trying to write some simple tooling for our codebase.
"I started my coding career using a Turbo Pascal clone for the Commodore Amiga, something called High-Speed Pascal, published by UK based company Hi-Soft."
It would be interesting if an open-source version of this Amiga Turbo Pascal clone - was available somewhere...
The language is much less annoying (oh how i hated Type and Var sections in the times). The gui programming style can be similar or can be modernized. The designer and component library is vastly improved. Third party components are cheap compared to today's "cloud" prices. There are libs for everything. Its free. Can be compiled to native binaries(not sure this will leave 'experimental'). Feels like a direct replacement to me.
And Delphi is still around, no need to talk as if it was dead.
In Germany, it has a regular section on the .NET developers magazine and an yearly conference.
Their pricing is a bit of a barrier to entry for new apps now.
That was Borland's mistake with their Inprise change, to abandon grassroots developers and focus on this kind of companies.
This was last year's conference, https://entwickler-konferenz.de/program-en/
Anyone using this hardware, is running Delphi on their network.
Basically losing the entire market where devs are allowed to choose their platform, because they won't be aware of it.
I suppose wining and dining the executives puts food on the table too.
That'll probably allow 99.99% of students and hobby programmers and a good chunk of small businesses to use it free forever without ever hitting this mark and seems to me like one of the fairest schemes to use expensive software out there. It's what we always wanted 15, 20 years ago.
Imagine Microsoft or SAP or whoever offered you to use their Windows Server Datacenter or ERP or even Office suite for free until you made a $5000 profit off of using their programs...
Besides it's funny. 5000 income - 3000 delphi license leaves... not much?
You're right, it is not very visible by going to the normal Delphi page. Not sure why - I think our website folk want to push people to the trial not Community. But here's the link: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter
Like 1600 and you get 1 year of support. After that you pay the yearly subscription fee to stay on support (about 400 or so). If you skip a year, you are back to the "never have been a paying customer" status.
It is not cheap.
Not all bad though, I do like Delphi itself, but the customer hostile attitude of the company does leave a bad aftertaste and make me want to ditch it.
This coming from a python guy who is looking to build a native admin area for a web product.
https://community.embarcadero.com/article/16560-deep-dive-ho...
For a short while C++/CX seemed to be finally it, but C++/Winrt has regressed the experience.
In fact, the Office team is probably the biggest consumer of C++/Winrt.
Windows 7 is dead, it is the new XP, time to move on.
At the time of the Delphi 8 release I went to a Delphi conference to get to know the community better. This was 2003 or so? I was evaluating whether or not to get more licenses for our company so we could put extra effort into developing Delphi for .NET.
Let's just say that I found the people there to be rude and insulting. Not just the people at the conference there but also by some of Borland staff there as well. A joke was played on me which I won't get into here but I didn't - and don't - appreciate being bullied.
Let's just say that the next day I abandoned Delphi and moved our entire company to Visual Studio and never looked back.
Why would you move your ENTIRE company to a different language/development system because someone was rude at a conference?
FWIW I felt out of place at conferences before, many are just an exercise in peacocking and showing off (and still, I have learnt some interesting things from some incredibly irritating people in my time). But I would never change something that I like and that works for me because other people that just so happen to use it too, are rude.
I've met arrogant and frankly insulting people at both Linux and Microsoft events, for example (Linux famously has people who can be wonderfully insulting on mailing lists and dare I say often deservedly so) but it would never occur to me to switch my entire company to, say, Windows Server, because Linus (heaven forbid) said something rude to me :-)
I can't even actually rule out that I might have behaved in a way that might have been interpreted as rude at conferences myself, especially after several days of travel, talks and general exhaustion. So I'd actually be curious to hear how you felt you were insulted or bullied or made a joke of so that I might keep an eye out for such behaviour myself.
FWIW, you may find that Borland is no longer around or involved with Delphi (and hasn't been for a decade now, I think), so the people might be different, too. I've certainly found Delphi worth a second look recently and hope the forums and communities of old have been or will be revived in some way.
I had an acquaintance who bought the most recent Delphi release (he’s a long term customer), but had some troubles so he installed the free community edition as a stop gap solution. They phoned him and bolloxed him and demanded he buy another copy, extremely rudely and extremely forcefully (almost as if the person calling had KPI’s for upsells).
Unless I had a burning reason to use Delphi, I would avoid it, since I don’t like dealing with stupid businesses if I can avoid it... Don’t burn your loyal customers...