Being a .NET programmer is, I guess, okay. We build our business objects, code our stuff, do our thing. And .NET is a pretty good environment to work with, I suppose … it has a lot of stuff, lots of classes, serialization built in, whatever. Lots of remote stuff. Good for building three-tier enterprise solutions. I think.
But there’s another sweet little pretty thing I like to play with, something called Delphi. And that little something keeps me on my toes. Forget about the .NET framework, forget about runtimes and deployables and libraries and all of that stuff. Delphi shoves all of that off the table with one sweep and lays the raw processor bare right in front of me. Bare metal to my fingertips.
With Delphi I can choose at whichever level I want to write code. Using the VCL to hack together forms and dialogs, or going directly for the Win32 API for the trickier things, or maybe I’ll just hand-tune my functions in raw assembler. Just because I like to. Just because I can.
I feel more and more like John Anderton, the hero in Matrix: “Mr. Anderton”, Smith says, “it seems you’ve been living two lifes.” One life in which I sit with the .NET thingamajig where I play with the class library and not much else. And another life, when I go home and spend my time hacking, in the most beautiful and powerful little language I know.
Delphi is quickly becoming the renegade tool of my choice, standing outside the whole Microsoft/Sun debate and every established language. It’s not Ruby, it’s not C#, not Java. It’s not hyped up, people don’t talk about it over lattes in hip little coffee shops. It’s just… Raw. Powerful. Fast. Passionate… and yet easy. Probably the best average blend between code simplicity and power that I’ve ever known.
In fact, if I hold up the Delphi box to my ears, I can just make out the rumble of lightning inside.
3 Comments
…until Borland, or whatever it is called today, puts your little friend to sleep for good. :)
That’s why you shouldn’t become to attached to closed source programming environments.
It’s sweet how something that sounds like Greek for one person can be like christmas
time for another :)
First of all, Delphi, or its predecessor Pascal, has been around since the early 1980′s. Programs written for Turbo Pascal 7.0 can still be compiled and run in Delphi. How’s that for stability?
Second, there are open-source alternatives for Delphi if you want it. There’s a FreePascal movement (Lazarus?) aiming to be a complete IDE and replacement. And while its not “open source”, the full VCL source code is included with every release of Delphi.
And, third, there is no sign that Borland/DevCo will put it to sleep, quite the contrary. Delphi is a profitable product, with a strong community behind it. If you think the end is near, you haven’t been following events too closely.
P.S. It actually is a bit greek, because there’s a huge database server called Oracle, and when the engineers tried to come up with a good name for the new product, someone said “If you want to see the Oracle, go to Delphi.” And thus the product was named. :) … it’s a pun on Delphi’s database capabilities.