Here are some statistics that were generated from StackOverflow showing the expected age of the answers by tag list.
Here are some statistics that were generated from StackOverflow showing the expected age of the answers by tag list.
The list is ordered by age. If you scroll to the very bottom, you'll find next to the war-stories and COBOL tags are the various Delphi tags.
I guess what it shows to me (and what i've known for some time) is that Delphi isn't being picked up by younger developers. In my own experiences, I rarely see any Delphi developers that are younger than 30 and most seem to be on average to be in their 40s at the Delphi meet-ups.
I think this is symptomatic of the stance taken by Borland/Inprise/CodeGear/Embarcadero in their pricing strategy which keeps Delphi out of the reach of young developers.
http://www.brianbondy.com/stackexchange/expected-age/stackoverflow/
The list is ordered by age. If you scroll to the very bottom, you'll find next to the war-stories and COBOL tags are the various Delphi tags.
I guess what it shows to me (and what i've known for some time) is that Delphi isn't being picked up by younger developers. In my own experiences, I rarely see any Delphi developers that are younger than 30 and most seem to be on average to be in their 40s at the Delphi meet-ups.
I think this is symptomatic of the stance taken by Borland/Inprise/CodeGear/Embarcadero in their pricing strategy which keeps Delphi out of the reach of young developers.
http://www.brianbondy.com/stackexchange/expected-age/stackoverflow/
I agree. It is unfortunate that Delphi has become a high priced niche tool.
ReplyDeleteHow were you introduced to Delphi, Simon?
ReplyDeleteBingo! Marco Cantù - We need more "cover disks" ;)
ReplyDeleteI'm 22 and I've been developing in Delphi since I was 15
ReplyDeleteThis topic (Delphi popularity) has been discussed a lot of times in many places.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, the most important factor to make Delphi more visible is to convince schools and universities to use Delphi for teachning computer programming. Long time ago, Pascal was used because the tools where cheap (Turbo Pascal) and there was no free tools. Now Delphi is very expensive and is faced with Java and C# which are free. If a student is used to Delphi, then when that student come into the real world, he will probably use Delphi as well if he has the choice.
Another important success factor is to convice managers that Delphi si the right tool to use. The current Embarcadero strategy is probably correct. I mean going to the mobile world. If Delphi finaly becomes a true cross platform tool (Win, Mac, iOS, Androïd, Linux), then the success wil come back. Firemonkey is an important piece in this strategy: having a single component set accross platform is really very important.
Frédéric Hannes Great to hear that! Do you work for yourself or in a company? From your perspective, what do you think would make more younger developers choose to learn or use Delphi?
ReplyDeleteFrédéric Hannes Similar to Simon, how did you get introduced to Delphi?
ReplyDeleteSimon Stuart - Note the quote marks around "cover discs". The point is having a version that you can have more or less for free, and that haven't been crippled - featurewise or license condition wise.
ReplyDeleteI'm 28 and started at 24 with Delphi. I also work with Python/Django and Java. I must say, some older Delphi developers with legacy applications also hold on to older versions of Delphi (like Delphi 5 or Delphi 6) for their applications which really turns me (and most probably other colleagues my age) off, next to the price tag... FireMonkey looks really cool.
ReplyDeleteThe question is - how can EMBT make money off such a version? They DO need to make a living out of their tools after all.
ReplyDeleteIn my day, universities taught Pascal in Comp Sci. These days it's probably Java or C# or the dynamic languages. Borland had it easy because most grads going into the workforce already knew Pascal and there it was easy to sell them a pascal compiler. It's harder for Embarcadero because they now also have to give developers a compelling reason to learn Delphi (Pascal) as a language as well. It's easier to sell Delphi to someone who already programs in Pascal than it is to a person who was raised on curly brackets.
ReplyDeleteLars Fosdal of course it is easy for us to say EMBT should do this or that. As you pointed it, EMBT must earn money now to survive. Earning money now and earning money later is frequently contradictory. Choices have to be made. This is what we call a strategy :-) Borland death was cause by a bad strategy. Always easier to say after... Delphi became a niche market. To go out of that niche, EMBT has to find a new good idea. They selected mobile. Probably a good choice. Future will tell us.
ReplyDeleteAs I see it, the Delphi ecosystem isn't strong. Delphi isn't dead but it still not out of the hospital yet. Embarcadero needs to lower the barrier of entry to fix their long term problems.
ReplyDeleteOnly by having a healthy thriving developer community will Delphi grow. This leads to more open source projects. A larger developer community will also give 3rd party tool vendors the confidence to continue to support Delphi. Having a greater wealth of Delphi developers and resources will also encourage companies to continue to maintain and even start new projects in Delphi. Companies don't magically decide to use Delphi - they use it because a developer within the company was able to build something of business value from the knowledge gained from using Delphi in their own time.
Embarcadero's most vocal critics are the developers but they are also their greatest evangelist. So I think Embarcadero really needs to concentrate and look after the grassroots if they really want Delphi to succeed.
Borland's death came when they turned their backs on maintaining and improving their developer tools and to fully concentrate on the "enterprise". Their move killed the goodwill built around their IDE/compiler tools allowing their competition to fill the gap and making them less relevant in the market.
ReplyDeleteI made a spinoff post on a possible new SKU model here: https://plus.google.com/103128232230617819686/posts/K9evafy5zKM
ReplyDeleteMarket demand for Delphi developers in Australia is probably the same as the UK.
ReplyDeleteHaving a mobile strategy is good but I get the feeling that it's aimed at existing Delphi shops (I could be wrong!). All of the same, regardless of what a C-level executive has to say on the topic, you still need to convince the developers that what EMBT is selling is a good strategy compared to whatever else is on the market. If they are existing Delphi developers then they may be open to the idea. But to non-Delphi shops, they would need a lot more convincing especially if they start looking in the job market for experienced Delphi developers. Most exp. Delphi devs are already employed or they have moved into non-Delphi development.
Apart from having a great product, they also need to lower the barrier of entry for independent programmers. The more developers using Delphi, the more better for everyone from 3rd party tool vendors to companies including EMBT.
Colin Johnsun I develop freeware atm in my spare time. I'm a computer science major at the KULeuven university in Belgium, but I never got taught Delphi in class, I learned it all by myself. I started out with VB6, but essentially I got introduced to Delphi by Aivars Irmejs somewhat indirectly. By using his Delphi based application, which I now develop, for Pascal scripting.
ReplyDeleteI think Delphi is a great language, and Embarcadero is making great strides to undo the damage done by Borland in the end (after D7), but I do think that the business model is broken. Without a free version of Delphi, like Microsoft's express editions, Delphi will never be able to gain much popularity with younger programmers. On top of that, the current model of abandoning old versions in terms of updates and bug fixes is also a big issue in my opinion.
Lars Fosdal Perhaps by remembering that the SV campus was built and paid for on inexpensive products. The (untested) argument is that the world is different now. Well, of course it is, but if you don't work at bringing new developers (young) into the fold, then maerketing be damned, at some point, the customers are all dead, or ritired, and Delphi does die.
ReplyDeleteGraeme Geldenhuys Free Pascal and his derivatives is not as good as Delphi. And I don't see EMBT promoting it for obvious reasons. We need a Delphi Express (or whatever name) which is free of charge and has less features than the full product but still can produce applications using 3rd party components. The model of Visual Studio express is a good example.
ReplyDeleteGraeme Geldenhuys And yet, I recall a story of 1 million Delphi licenses sold to Russia for schools....
ReplyDeleteFrançois Piette Apparently Turbo Delphi did not achieve what was hoped, so why would they venture down that road again?
ReplyDeleteBill Meyer I wasn't around for Turbo Delphi, but I'm guessing they must have done something wrong, it obviously worked for Microsoft... Atm, when I tell people to try Delphi, they either don't believe that Delphi still exists, or they don't want to try it because there is no free edition. I admit that for the first few years I used a torrented copy of D7, because it was rather hard to justify the expensive license to produce freeware as a high-school student. I now own licenses for 2010->XE2, but even at the academic pricing of about €180 for a pro edition, it's still pretty expensive for a student. On top of that, I get MS' VS Pro for free as part of their DreamSpark project. It's hard to justify using Delphi at that point.
ReplyDeleteWhat I'm saying is that Embarcadero should focus on providing people, especially students and educational institutions, with very cheap or even free editions. Not only focusing on making this option available, but also marketing it as an innovative technology that can benefit education and growing enterprises. Right now I see Delphi mainly being used for legacy support by companies that can't justify rewriting their codebase in another language.
Graeme Geldenhuys It's a matter of opinion, but I've tried FPC with Lazarus on many occasions and I've never been very satisfied with it. Also, it just doesn't feel as polished as Delphi.
ReplyDeleteGraeme Geldenhuys FPC correspond more or less to an OLD delphi version. If you switched to FPC 6 years ago, this explain why you don't understand. FPC/Lazarus is far from being equivalent to Delphi XE3. It lacks a lot of features (Language, IDE, debugger, VCL, RTL,...) and is not really compatible. Try to use any Delphi component not specially crafted to be compatible with FPC and you'll quickly understand that it is not a Delphi replacement. If you want to discuss FPC, please create a new topic.
ReplyDeleteThe only feature I miss in FPC is anonymous methods. Otherwise it is 100% compatible with DCC with {$mode delphi} switch, at least as far as I am concerned.
ReplyDeleteGraeme Geldenhuys Well, one'd hope that the Lazarus IDE is better than Delphi 7's... Delphi 7 is over 10 years old.
ReplyDelete