Remembering Delphi... (feat. Anders Hejlsberg)

I remember my favorite development tool and language, Delphi, when I was working as a developer. It is a language that made it possible to study the fun and rewarding of coding and OOP in depth. It is a pity that it has not been used much recently and seems to be disappearing.

The language I learned in the “Introduction to Programming” course in my freshman year of university is Pascal. The compiler used at the time was Borland's Turbo Pascal. Since then, I have learned and learned new programming languages such as C, Visual Basic, Java, C++, C#, and Python, but my favorite language is still Pascal.

If the C language's OOP extension is C++, the Pascal language's OOP extension is Object Pascal, and the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) tool that can develop with this Object Pascal language is Delphi. At first, Object Pascal, a language, and Delphi, a tool, were used to refer to each other separately, but at some point, Delphi became a word that refers to both a language and a tool.

Delphi is an integrated development environment (IDE) and language used to create programs that run on Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android. The basic grammar is the same as the Pascal grammar, but several functions have been added to Pascal, and it currently exists as a language called Delphi. Originally developed by Borland, it is now owned and developed by Embarcaderos.

The latest version of the Delphi compiler is included with Embarcadero RAD Studio.

source: Delphi - Wikipedia, the everyone's encyclopedia (wikipedia.org)

Delphi provides a very nice library called the Visual Class Library (VCL). I was able to understand the concept of OOP (Object Oriented Programming) much better by looking at the VCL source code. VCL is a well-structured library, so I was able to learn how to design and correlate classes just by browsing the source code.

Delphi was created under the leadership of Anders Hejlsberg, a Danish engineer who developed Borland's Turbo Pascal. Anders Hejlsberg is one of the living legends of programming language and software development.

Anders Heilsberg - Wikipedia, The Encyclopedia for All (wikipedia.org)

Visual J++ (1996), C# (2000), and TypeScript (2012) were created by this person leaving Borland and moving to Microsoft.

Around 2001, there was a craze for learning .NET in Korea. At that time, while learning the C# language for the first time, I felt that 'the syntax is like Java, and the object model and class library are like Delphi'. It was only later that I realized that the person who made Delphi had created C#, and I remember thinking that my feelings were not wrong.

Attached is a YouTube interview video uploaded on February 11, 2019. About 10 seconds into the video, he introduces himself as “Anders Heilsberg”. The wiki page's "Anders Heilsberg" seems to have a Danish pronunciation.

BEHIND THE CODE: The one who created languages – YouTube

Some parts of this video are indexed.

• 01:12: Turbo Pascal
• 06:09: Delphi
• 06:54 .NET, C#
• 09:22: TypeScript

There is a site where the above interview video was written in text, so I'll link to it.

The one who created languages (welcometothejungle.com)

Delphi has lost popularity since the mid-2000s and is now (2022) a non-mainstream language with few users.

14th in January 2022 (Note:TIOBE Index for January 2022), but in February it was down one notch to 15th. As of October 2022, it is ranked 18th. Rating (search share) is less than 1%, so it can be seen that the popularity is definitely not there regardless of the ranking.

Among the Delphi versions, Delphi version 3 was briefly used for learning purposes, and 4, 5, 6, and 7 were used for development work at the project site.

There is a page commemorating the 27th anniversary of the Delphi file, and some contents are extracted and recorded.

source: Celebrating Delphi's 27th Anniversary (embarcadero.com) (https://delphi.embarcadero.com/)

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I liked the strict and rigid Pascal syntax a lot. I was able to know the real fun of programming with the Object Pascal language extended to OOP. Delphi was a tool and a language that made it possible for me to create the software I wanted to create and not others.

Although programming is no longer my main job since 2004, Delphi is always on my mind.

I hope that Delphi will not go away and stay forever.