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I'm sure you heard about the first ever photo of a black hole. The associated research paper credits the open source scientific python libraries NumPy, SciPy and Pandas. Python was also one of the tools used in the hunt for the Higgs Boson and CERN scientists have spoken at Python conferences. The PyCon conference has been sponsored by everyone from LucasFilm and Disney Studios to Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Canonical, Disqus, Mozilla, J.P. Morgan bank, Twitter, Hulu, and Amazon. In fact, those were just a handful of the 2012 sponsors. Take a look at CodeRage sponsors: "Atozed Software, DevJet Software, Fast Reports Inc, Raize Software, Scooter Software, SmartBear and Steema Software." Draw your own conclusions.

1. We get posts here, Reddit, etc. along the lines of "Please help me install Borland Database Engine on Windows 10" all the time. A large number of the Delphi applications being maintained today are being maintained on old versions of Delphi and the companies responsible for them have no desire to spend anything to modernize them. For example, the Melissa and Doug toy company in the United States uses an in-house ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) program written and still maintained in Delphi 7. 1B. Again, a "skilled developer" can't just look at one million lines of undocumented code (that might be older than they are) and fix it. It could take years for a dedicated open source community to work their way through and document that code. Even then, the only sane options would be to massively refactor and modernize it or, again more likely, simply start over. 1C. Who would be in charge of the code? Would Embarcadero oversee it? If so, they might not approve changes. And they're unlikely to want to give up control, as that would be giving up control of the language. Going back to Firebird, they have a poor history of properly supporting open source code, and Marc Hoffman said that one EMBT employee said during discussions "We own Pascal." Not quite the mindset required to turn over control of their compiler/language to a third party. 1D. If there aren't enough developers interested and able to support FreePascal or NewPascal, where are the developers going to come from to spend years trying to make sense of the old Delphi desktop compilers, a much harder task with a much longer time to payoff? 2. Are you serious? Get-It has about 200 packages after four years, most of which are trials. Torry's Delphi Pages, the oldest collection of Delphi software still around, has a little over 10,000 packages ( a number that's barely moved from 2012), the vast majority of which are from the Delphi 5-7 era and most of the rest being trials of paid software. In the last 30 days it's added 17 files, only one of which is for free software. Now take a look here: http://www.modulecounts.com/ Java has over 274,000 open source libraries at Maven Central, C# has over 148,000 in nuget, Python over 174,000. Java is adding 197 a day, C# 93, Python 122. Per above, Delphi added 1 in 30 days. What libraries is Delphi lacking? Almost anything that doesn't involve grids (Delphi users are obsessed with grids). Serious numeric software (although you can pay $1600 for a bundle of Dew Research's matrix library, sci/stat function library, 3 basic data mining algorithms and Steema's TeeChart). Machine learning libraries. Financial libraries. Let's go smaller - I'm interested in making a media player. Delphi lacks a music file tag manipulation library (that's post-unicode and documented), audio manipulation library, replay gain library, cover art library, etc., all of which I can find on other platforms as open source. I'm working on another pet project now that involves data analysis and machine learning and if successful will require interacting with websites. I'd like to host it on a Linux Virtual Private Server eventually, which means $3500 for Delphi Enterprise. As mentioned above, the Dew Research bundle with source is $1600, bringing us up to $5100. Now let's add in Steema's TeeBi for some basic data manipulation abilities to clean and transform the data, which is $279. Wait, the only plugin it works with out of the box to export to Excel is TMS' FlexCel. So unless we want to find an open source Delphi Excel library and integrate it ourselves, that's another $141USD. Now we're up to $5520. A capable profiler? Smartbear AQTime Pro - another $600. Now we're at $6120. Let's toss in HelpNDoc for documentation for another $280USD. Now we're at $6400 so far. I want some neural networks... Boris Mitov has 1980's-era Kohonen self-organizing feature maps and basic backpropagation for $389 without source or $1369 with source. That's madness; I coded both algorithms circa 1994 for a school project in Turbo Pascal. Let's use FANN instead, which is an open source library that implements some improvements to basic backpropagation and has a fast C core. There's also an open source implementation of the NEAT neural algorithm for Delphi, but not the next-gen HyperNEAT. Oh well. Genetic programming? RiverSoftAVG has a decent library with basic features for $150. So $6550 so far and we haven't looked at logging or databases. We'll need to scrape and parse HTML - DIHtmlParser is $123 with source code but is very low-level. There's a higher-level parser on Github, but the only documentation is in Japanese. There's an "HTML Component Library" available that seems rather nice, but it's bundled with a lot I wouldn't need, raising the price to $350. Come to think of it, once all of this comes together and is working I'm going to need a high-level process to manage all of the various software tasks - downloading data, parsing data, processing data, interacting with the right websites at the right time, not launching a process that depends on another that failed, etc. Sadly, there simply aren't any "pipeline " libraries for Delphi at any price. And this is the point when one does the math and realizes they could take that money and buy a new desktop with a 32 core AMD Threadripper, 64GB memory, high-end graphics card for GPU acceleration, 3 NVMe SSDs in RAID 0 for hyper-fast caching with a few large-capacity hard drives in RAID 5 as backing storage, large curved 4K monitor, etc. and even have some money left over. Seriously. And they can use the Python scientific software stack of NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib for matrices and graphics, but also use modern "grammar of graphics" (functional composition) libraries like plotnine or altair, something TeeChart doesn't offer. Pandas has had almost a 10 year lead time on TeeBI and is far fuller featured and much better documented. Scikit-learn offers a massive machine learning suite, unlike Dew Research's anemic three methods and no support functions. NeuPy offers a vast amount of neural networks for free, plus one can download and use TensorFlow from Google or PyTorch from Facebook and gain support for modern deep learning frameworks that do things like power self-driving cars. Let's see, there's a HyperNEAT implementation too; and genetic programming libraries like DEAP which can scale across all the machines on a network if you wish, and also the best clustering algorithm, DBSCAN, which I couldn't find for Delphi. There's the well-known scrapy framework, as well as BeautifulSoup for high-level HTML parsing. Pipeline programs? Companies like Spotify have open-sourced tools like luigi and AirBNB has airflow. Both can produce web pages to monitor the performance of your processes and view dependency graphs in real time! And there's Selenium for driving the major web browsers across platforms. And that's the difference between using Delphi and using a modern language with 100,000+ free and open source cross-platform libraries available. I've spent zero on software, gotten much more powerful libraries in many cases, and don't have to spend weeks or months implementing low-level libraries myself and can instead concentrate on the problem I'm trying to solve. That was the original appeal of Delphi - the VCL abstracted away the monotonous low-level Windows API to allow developers to code only the solutions relevant to their specific problem. Nowadays this is a solved problem in the form of open source software and Delphi is no longer the "rapid" application development it originally was. You're going to spend lots of time writing things that other language users can download and install from modern package managers in seconds. Your other alternative is to spend thousands of dollars on lesser libraries maintained by one person who may disappear tomorrow. In a research paper designed to discover what makes programming languages popular, the authors found from surveys that the single most important factor to developers in choosing a language is the amount of libraries available, preferably open source libraries. I've seen one developer put it this way, "Today, isn't not being popular itself a language defect?"

Sorry, I will, and all of us should stop it. Sorry, but I couldn't resist to clarify misinformation about my beloved country in this forum which is all about my beloved Delphi (which is obvious not suitable for political topics).

Open source isn't giving up. It's allowing contributions from outside. Emba would still be in control. The only open source project I have any involvement is Spring4d. Who do you think is the boss of that? It sure ain't me. And that's exactly how it should be. A good open source project has strong management and leadership, and those contributors that can fit in and add to the development effort are facilitated. You don't just hand control to random collaborators. Stefan's point about open source collaborators is spot on. Good programmers aren't going to spend their time on open source projects unless it's rewarding and fun. I certainly could never see myself working with the OP here.

Serious question. So far you have managed to volunteer other people to do the compiler fixing. But you haven't told us anything about what can you offer in that regard? How can you help improving and fixing the compiler? What are your skills?

That's a major factor that damaged Delphi, per my earlier post. People don't sell each other software libraries anymore. They open source them, which attracts more people to the language, which means more open source libraries for you to use. As I always say, "Make money with Delphi, not from Delphi". Every library that's sold only raises the barrier to entry for a potential new user. If I was being mean, I could say that Python or javascript developers don't need to sell libraries because they can find jobs. Also, their tool suites don't cost more than their desktops. Now your second point gets to one of the things on my list of what I'd do if I ran Embarcadero. You're half right. We need a way to make importing easier. We don't need a conversion tool though. There's a long-running open source project whose software automatically wraps C and C++ code to make it callable from other languages! It's called SWIG, or Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator. Referencing my point about popularity again, it even supports Modula-3 (!!!) but not Delphi. The good news is that I encountered someone on Stack Overflow whose company added support for Delphi to SWIG internally and were able to generate a fine wrapper of a complex C++ 3D graphics library with it. The bad news is that although asked his company did not appear interested in open sourcing their work. But of course, that means that it is possible to add Delphi support to SWIG. Now, when I tried to broach the subject with The Powers That Be, Marco Cantu decided to deny that a problem even existed, insisting that he does not believe that the .NET ecosystem is larger than the Delphi ecosystem (!!!!). That's when I realized that if you don't acknowledge problems even exist you'll never solve them. Since he wouldn't admit there was a problem, he obviously wasn't interested in hearing my idea for solving it - in this case, I thought Embarcadero should add Delphi support to SWIG and integrate it with the IDE or include it with the installer. Other languages have FFIs (Foreign Function Interfaces) that make it easy to interoperate with other languages. Delphi does almost nothing to make it easier and it's the equivalent of banging on it with a hammer to get C++ code into Delphi. Here's an example of a newer one for Python: PyBind11. (Python has a FFI in its standard library, but it's not very full-featured). But this does serve to illustrate the point that it can be even easier to interface C++ with a dynamically typed language without pointers than it often is to get C++ code working with Delphi currently.

Wait, you thought you knew his project better than he did? Seriously?

Hello, As you are reading this message, you probably use ICS. Good! But have you taken time to register your ICS copy? ICS is freeware but to use it, you must register it. Registration is very simple: just mail a [real, paper] picture postcard to the author (me). You can find instructions in the readme8.txt file in ICS distribution. Thanks. PS: If you already sent your picture postcard, simply ignore this message. If you want to know if I received it, then you must tell me by email when you sent it, from which country and what the picture look like (I have several thousands postcards!).

Not yet, but it‘s near.

@Joseph MItzen you just analysed everything perfectly from my point of view. 👍

So, are you suggesting to start a new topic on FPC/Newpascal fork? For me, those topics are closely related, since actually some closed-sourced apps were open-sourced due to threat from already free competitors. And surely, FPC can't be off-topic in Delphi community.

I'm pretty sure many of the countries on the receiving end of US' forced friendship has a different view on that. Look to me like the US is actually also guilty of most of the issues you listed. I don't mind the US looking after its own interests, just don't pretend it's doing anything but that. China is a complex issue. Sure it's bad in some areas, but it's slowly improving. It's a huge country and rapid change would cause the country to implode.

Didn't you mean to capitalize "US"? And on that note I can't see how what China is trying to do is different from what the US is already doing to the rest of the world...

The United States isn't actively planning to annex Taiwan, hasn't enabled a "Great Firewall" to control its citizens' access to the Internet, hasn't declared a President For Life, hasn't engaged in a worldwide scourge of industrial espionage, doesn't artificially devalue its currency to court manufacturing jobs, doesn't fill factories with prison labor, doesn't hold innocent Canadians hostage when one of its industrialists is arrested, hasn't instituted a nationwide biometric monitoring network, hasn't built a network of artificial islands in the South China Sea to prevent access, annex territory and be able to grab resources by military force, and isn't too inclined to run peaceful protestors with tanks. it's also not rolling all of this personal data into a nightmarish "social trustworthiness rating", designed to punish those not deemed sufficiently loyal to the state: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-social-credit-system-flight-booking-blacklisted-beijing-points-a8646316.html?amp The United States is the key country preventing China from extending its reach and enslaving other populaces or taking their territories.