MichaelT

We are not the Cash Cows, that's Delphi. We are the goats to be milked. Reminds me of a story in my childhood in which a goat used to complain, 'I only jumped over grass and didn't find a single leaf'. Maybe at least another one in this forum who read the same stories or fairy tales in the child hood and nowadays as well on EMB flyers ... Pretty much the same issue with COM/ActiveX/COM+ support in the 1990s. Delphi went beyond what VB was in the position to offer but pretty 'late' in comparison what C/C++ offered once the feature was offered by Windows. These days almost no user except from a few enthusiasts installed the latest version of Windows the moment it was released. It was still easier to implement something using those technologies compared to writing all the various files manually in a consistent way at once. It didn't hurt to be late, but features offered by Delphi were never released on time the moment external dependencies came into play. Delphi never offered a more convenient consistent way of building COM & Co artifacts in a sense of just more easy C or C++, without haven to ship additional BPLs or link proprietary stuff. Delphi .net did away with all that because MS did away with all that when introducing C# .net in V 1.1. better said little later in 2.0. Even if room for improvement was left, those major issued were addressed and finally covered. This game of everlasting catching up returned together with the various SDKs offered for different platforms by the vendors. The idea of giving up on expected quality shipped at the same point in time but on budget never really worked out great for anyone (triangle) and is a luxury today btw. Embarcadero does ship new features and I observe a slowing down almost everywhere, when it comes to tools and technologies. This same problems the vendors of CASE tools have not been in the position to address let IDEs turn out to become one of the most dominant concepts and finally the big winner at the end of the 20th century. Putting a strong focus on just quality would put Delphi immediately into a corner/niche in which Eiffel & Co ended up almost 30 years ago. Today there is not even a niche left because all those who provide technologies designed their own IDE for their niches. - It's hard to change the language in a fully integrated environment when the IDE relies on scanning source code files. I'm aware that Delphi does not scan source code files solely. The big advantage of JARs and .net 'assemblies' hurt C/C++ around 2k. A few years later the hip web programming languages run into pretty much the same problem e.g. PHP4 vs. PHP5 still remaining the best example. When PHP Storm started to address this issue the one idea or the other moved into the mainstream IDEs too for very much the same reason but never made it into Delphi and C++ is a whole different story but today those features are available too. No matter if a community did provide them or the supplier. Since C programmers started to use those languages too the C ish programming style (Schottern slang. ger. ok. Austrian language), writing 50 lines of code and compile them later at one, spread. IDEs adopted into this direction. Think of an article about 'Delphi fighting a battle lost long time ago, in which a former Delphi programmer talked very positive about being in the position to write working code that way without the need to compile, because of being guided by the IDE plus Java technology. Same counts for VS and C#/.net to a certain degree. I call that assisted coding similar to assisted living (residence). Today the last issue, which is no for me personally, is Error Insight. I personally do have nothing but 'Use Editor Font' checked an nothing else enabled in Code Insight. This time I found no reason to turn those features off but I don't have 10.4 installed at the moment. So I cannot comment on how far 'Assisted Programming' is supported today. Error Insight works for me too. - Language: I don't care in general or at all. I'm happy. - Compilers: It makes sense for such a professional tool allowing other tool providers (e.g. threading & Co) to support Delphi Win64 quickly. This has always been missing but since vendors do/did support Delphi 32-bit there must have been a demand. There will be no nice little handy Delphi once again, even if EMB(T) is trying to sell such an illusion. That's not the only reason why tested 'quality' has to be shipped. No one assumes a development system that allows to address such a wide range of applications and platforms the native way to be nice and cuddly but it must work and using it must work smoothly. - In fact we never really went beyond having 4 tabs Standard, Additional, Win32 and System. Ok, dialogs and Win 3.1 for those who have to cope with the ultimate legacy source code. Anything else is usable and well maintained imo. What hurts to a certain degree that from the overall picture/perspective Lazarus/FPC leaves a more complete or compact impression at a first glance. Not talking about what can be done or what the result might be, just from the perspective of how things can be done. In order to build your own controls in sense of widget set today, you needed a continuously improved CDK. For all those who have to maintain millions of lines of code building components for both VCL and FMX is not a big issue very likely. It's very nice to have access to an IDE which MVPs can handle and extend with style(s). This approach sound pretty elite not saying esoteric. Admiring all of you for what you are in the position to do with Delphi, will not help to grow a young generation of programmers within an acceptable amount of time. Kidding. Today people use tools like hardware tools lying around in grand pa's craft cellar or a workshop. I'm wondering in how far it does make sense from the developer's perspective (apart from buying components which introduces a lower but another kind of complexity) to be in the position to create a component (especially) for the GUI but having to consider all available target platforms in order stay happy because of being prepared for whatever target that has to be addressed in the future. Putting silver under the pillow neighter does make you feel save nor does it make you sleep better. On a contrary your will very likely wake up with headache.