At least at the time it allowed me to build professionally looking applications with practically nil experience and with little effort.
But later they become CodeGear and later their R&D division is moved to Romania. Products become unstable and unreliable.
I own Delphi and still nothing beats it productivity wise for desktop applications. I successfully used Lazarus as well to develop Raspberry Pi based GUI software that controls various electronic gizmos(debugging on Pi was unstable but I've managed).
For products that do not have GUI (or using browser for front end) I stick to C++.
Embarcadero's pricing / marketing though does suck big time. Well, the only product that comes close to Delphi for GUI development is QT and their licensing and pricing sucks even more.
Yes they are. I do find it strange though to base language acceptance criteria on regex when there are tons of libs. But yes Delphi has its own as well
Does Delphi even have a LGPL option ? Because with Qt's LGPL you can use it in a lot of proprietary systems without having to pay for a license
I heard Delphi has free version. I did not go into detail as I own commercial version and keep it up to date. But from what I understand you can use their community edition for free as long as you do not make more than $5000 per year.
the OSS licensing terms are the LGPL or GPL.
- https://github.com/qt/qtbase/blob/dev/LICENSE.GPL3
- https://github.com/qt/qtbase/blob/dev/LICENSE.LGPLv3
- https://github.com/qt/qtdeclarative/blob/dev/LICENSE.GPL3
- https://github.com/qt/qtdeclarative/blob/dev/LICENSE.LGPLv3
they can add whatever separate licensing scheme they want in addition to that but if a repo has LICENSE.LGPLv3 in it, you can use it under LGPL like every other OSS project (and those two repos cover by far most of Qt, you can pretty much build an entire OS userspace out of them).
Wait isn't QT free?
Do you?
I still think they are wrong, though, and these companies would make way more money if they'd cater to the masses at a price range of $30 to $100 per major version (depending on the version/features). In the VST plugin market, price ranges were comparably high until companies figured out that the mass of hobby musicians is more lucrative. Now products are basically on eternal sale, prices reduced from 50% to 95%.
In the VST market increased competition forced companies to lower prices during sales. Maybe the lack of competition prevents the same from happening to IDE companies.
I am pretty sure they might even sell more professional licenses if they had a wider userbase of enthusiast users.
All of this is per-seat, too.
It's really "Our company and or university gives us enough money to blow on software that we don't have to look at the prices"-oriented pricing.
LispWorks is amazing software from a development standpoint (though SBCL is significantly faster if you're actually using what you write), but it's also one of the best examples of predatory proprietary software.
Your conclusion is completely wrong. From what I see, LispWorks is making just barely the minimum to make their operation work. I wouldn't classify this as predatory. They're just trying to make enough money to survive on an environment where very few people are willing to pay for software. From what I see, most people using Lisp are hobbyists, and they already use open source products. To survive, LispWorks had to search for companies that wanted/need to pay for a supported version of Lisp.
Now, Microsoft using proprietary software to lock customers, that is predatory.
Initially LispWorks *only* addressed the professional and academic market (for UNIX systems) with the professional edition, enterprise edition, site licenses and special implementations (like the one on NASA's Deep Space One). Over time it got ported to Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS.
A bunch of years ago they have introduced two versions of 'Hobbyist' editions: with delivery and without. This is still expensive, but in reach for dedicated hobbyists (my hobby camera costs like five times of a Hobbyist license).
Meanwhile, mostly only LispWorks and Franz Inc survived in the commercial market for Common Lisp, while all cheaper Lisp offerings (from companies like Expertelligence, Procycon, Corman, Gold Hill, Apple, ... etc.) haven't survived as a commercial and maintained product.
Competitors in similar or more expensive price ranges also went away (Lucid, Symbolics, TI, Xerox, LMI, Ibuki, ...).
Franz and LispWorks must have done something right -> they are still there and publish new releases, while all the other companies (in various price ranges and various target markets) had to give up.
To attract new users, you first have to show them, that you have a great product, then you can charge them. I am very happy that LispWorks is still a product and wish them all the best. If their strategy works well for them, great! I can only tell the story why I haven't gotten LispWorks, despite having a good impression of the system in the minimal trial I was able to run. But I couldn't try it to the point where I would have been willing to spend that much money on this. I am a Lisp programmer for over 20 years now, 15 of those as a professional developer. I ended up with the stack consisting of SBCL+Slime+LTk. Also quit nice :). At work, our team uses mostly SBCL and Allegro. None of us has used LispWorks, all for similar reasons. And that is, why no one pushed for LispWorks, when purchase decisions were discussed.
LispWorks has the no-cost Personal Edition to get an impression and one can get trial licenses of the whole product.
Generally I fear that there is very little money to be made from a low-price (say: $100 - $300) Lisp implementation (the market is still small) and that few people will upgrade to a more expensive version of it (what would be the reason to do so?).
I tried the no-cost edition, but as it couldn't run my pet project I was working on back then (memory limit), that trial lasted a few minutes and I continued to use SBCL.
In reality it is a company with a handful of employees in a very small niche market.
I believe many React Native, Electron and other hybrid solutions are made by people like me, who don't want to spend huge amounts of money to test an unknown piece of tech. These people also make recommendations to the companies they work for, which would actually afford to buy these licenses.
Why not think of a "discount" as part of the marketing budget? How much money do they spend on marketing and sales to get new customers? They will get new developers who will improve the branding and gain new "leads" organically.
Things like Matlab and Mathematica end up in the $2k to $3k for commercial business, but just a few hundred for hobbyists.
I've been playing with a batteries included (like kitchen sink, but still tiny) Forth language (pretty rare as most Forths are focused on embedded) called 8th that is dirt cheap for a professional edition. I think it has a good price model as it is exactly what I'd be comfortable paying for something niche.
Jetbrains proved that you can successfully can compete against free. But the pricing needs to be reasonable.
The pricing was intentional which is different from saying someone "priced themselves out of a market" (which I take to be an unintentional act). They (wrongly) intentionally targeted both an enterprise and niche desktop development segment of the market who are not building mass market apps and could never escape from there because the value of Delphi diminished when Java, and especially C# became mainstream in the early 2000s.
This mistake has more complexity to it when you understand what what going on around Borland and the market in the late 90s. If you are looking at it now, then it just seems like an obvious unforced error.