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Comment by redstripe | Hacker News Reader

In terms of job availability it's been dead a long time. I see a single job posted on craigslist every 6 months in city with 50 daily job postings.

Part of the problem is the kind of corporate windows CRUD apps that Delphi excelled at are better implemented as web apps. Which leaves it relegated to hobby developers and 1 man software vendors.

Even weirder is that in 2002 the Delphi community developed a python 2.7/3 type schism over UI changes and .NET inclusion and a large portion of the community refused to adopt new releases. It's pretty telling when a vendor isn't even able to get many of it's own supporters (many of which are these "Delphi will never die" types) to buy new version of their software in over a decade.

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The insanely high prices aren't helping either though. Yes yes, they are not 'high' if you are a fortune 1000, however, they are high compared to what everyone is used to now. They didn't step on the train of making for instance a version free if you are an open source dev. Or doing low monthly payments. Or do anything 'cool', like turn up and give a demo on how to implement reactive manifesto complaint software client/server with a few clicks / lines of code. That kind of thing would be relevant and interesting to devs now; if you can do a dashboard in Mac OS X, Windows, iOS, Android with all the backend & frontend stuff smoothly working together, smoothly tested and smoothly deployed, showing off those 6000 datapoints per second coming into the server and the client and still have a responsive interface companies would listen. But they don't; they just don't 'do' anything people want now besides turning up to the mobile parties way too late.

I kind of wonder how many devs still are working on Delphi and if they are not only just bugfixing...

I think Embarcadero is seriously hurting themselves with their bunker mentality.

Their whole "there are only X paying customers left, therefore we need to charge $3000" stinks of someone who is preparing for failure, instead of growth.

It really looks like low self-esteem play of some group that secretly believes the market doesn't want what they have, so they desperately milk their few remaining customers to make next months payroll.

I keep hoping some startup sees the huge arbitrage opportunity that is sitting there. Someone just needs to come along and build a quality GUI around the toolchain - very much like what Xamarin did for Mono - and similarly they need to charge a sane subscription model (free for OS/hobbyist, $99 personal dev, $399 corporate lite, etc).

> the Delphi community developed a python 2.7/3 type schism over UI changes and .NET inclusion and a large portion of the community refused to adopt new releases.

Not quite the way I remembered it. It was more like, "if we're going to develop in .NET then we're going to develop in C#." We liked Delphi for its native compile and unencumbered executable. No point in adding all the .NET baggage and not learning/using it's native language too.

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