Martha Stewart called it a Good Thing when zlatko.matic1@sb.t-com.hr ("Zlatko Matic") wrote:
> It seems that many people fanatically recommend Delphi, while others
> fanaticaly despise Delphi. I've sent a question about comparative
> features of MS Access/Visual Studio/Delphi for working with
> databases to a newsgroup and people started to quarell instead of
> argumenting anything ! Interesting....
The problem with Delphi is that it is uncertain where it will stand
five and ten years down the road.
Keep in mind that the bulk of the costs associated with deploying
custom applications have to do with ongoing maintenance. You need the
ability to continue to deploy changes as "business requirements" (or
whatever is most akin, for non-business organizations) change.
Five years ago, I was hearing conversations where people were actively
migrating away from Delphi because of deep concerns as to whether
Borland would exist a year down the road.
To an extent, that has been proven wrong, as both Borland and Delphi
are still around.
However, the "severe dangers" to Borland certainly still exist.
Microsoft wants to cut them out as a Windows vendor; Microsoft would
rather you pay your "development tools" money to Microsoft for .NET
and the likes. Microsoft is severely dangerous to them, in that
Microsoft controls what is in forthcoming versions of Windows, which
is doubtless why they have put some effort into Kylix, which is
essentially Delphi for Linux.
Killer question: Can you assume that apps you wrote two years ago
(with Delphi) will still be able to run on top of Longhorn? If not,
that makes Delphi a dangerous choice.
There are those that would criticize it for it using Pascal; it's not
really worth going there...
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