Delphi in the Age of AI

[simonw]

Please, please don't ever start a technical article with anything that reads like this:

> Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most fascinating and rapidly-growing areas of computer science. Although still in its early stages, AI has already started to revolutionize the world we live in, with applications in everything from self-driving cars to medical diagnosis.

[tux3]

Counterpoint: I'd rather find out in the first paragraph. If this whole article is going to be a fluffy slop-slathered delve, save me time.

[sdsd]

When I converted to Mormonism last year, I met an older missionary couple and bonded with the husband over our love for programming. He's a Delphi developer who supports legacy applications. He's had a lot of trouble finding work, but doesn't feel equipped to learn any modern stack. I think his wife is selling clothes online to support themselves.

[mickeyp]

Yes, that sounds like a Delphi developer alright.

I worked with Delphi personally and professionally for many, many years. You were at the precipice of unemployment in the 2000s if you used it then. To do it now? You're like a looney toons character suspended in mid-air. There's Delphi work around, to be sure, but you're competing against people with 30 years of commercial experience building -- or rather just keeping them limping along -- today, and they are as desperate as the Powerbuilder, Oracle Forms, FoxPro and Lotus Domino folk in scratching out an income in a stagnant pool.

Delphi died an ignominious death a long time ago, and it is truly sad. I miss it; frontend development today is a joke compared to what we could do with Delphi. But so what? It's dead. And it's not coming back.

[ivraatiems]

Why doesn't he feel equipped? Is it an age/speed-of-learning thing, or more of a, there's too many new concepts and not enough time?

Genuinely asking, not trying to be snarky. My prior assumption is typically that a capable engineer in one language or stack can learn another relatively easily.

[gcanyon]

He should have a look at Filemaker -- it's an active product with customers that need help (last time I checked) and owned by Apple, so it's not going anywhere for at least a bit longer. The dev environment is at a similar level -- I think, I'm not that familiar with Delphi.

[egorfine]

> but doesn't feel equipped to learn any modern stack

why?

[seif_madc]

As a programmer, and not as a company seeking profit by any means, i seek the easiest and most reliable solution for the problem in hand, and Delphi works like a charm for me, and it is very very far from dead, by the time of writing this, on the TOIBE index , Delphi is at the 10th place, Rust and Kotlin are #18 and #19 respectively, oh look, even Ada is ranked #13, so yeah,please stop saying a programming language is dead because it is old or not your favorite or simply because you don't know anything about programming languages except Javascript.

[mickeyp]

Uh-huh. There are zero -- sorry, nil -- Delphi jobs on jobserve in the UK. That is one of the leading job sites in the UK. Zero. There are 282 jobs with python in the job description.

[vslira]

This last week I've been receiving emails from Embarcadero (I can't recall ever registering on their site, but it's possible that I did in the quarter century I've been online) so, together with this post, I suppose management is doing some marketing push.

[adinhitlore]

It's exploding, just look at my post history if you will i just asked about it yesterday that it climbed from 183 to 10th place in the tiobe index in just 5 years! It's absurd, I don't hate it but the 'oject pascal' is just too alien if you come from C, C++ or even C#/java or even PHP background. In fact I don't even know what it resembles? Is it fortran? ok, i googled it: so it's simula, I mean if we pretend object pascal = Delphi and they are very similar or the same thing, right? Is anyone using Simula in 2025? It's not an easy learning path...but I'm not against it, hope it becomes alternative to the "C"-influenced languages.

[siva7]

Delphi -> C# -> Typescript.

This is the evolution. It has never been easier to make apps just by using a browser that runs on all platforms.

[haolez]

As a former Delphi developer, this is very far from truth, in my experience. Nothing modern beats the ease of RAD with Delphi, where you had actually business people making complex software (with a huge amount of tech debt, of course).

I'm not saying it's better - Delphi sucks for a lot of reasons - but this is the only aspect where it really shines.

[MehdiHK]

That's the author's (Anders Hejlsberg) journey of these programming languages. Doesn't need to be evolution though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg

[sharts]

Seems more like devolution. Mass appeal is rarely a sign of evolutionary progress.

[wolvesechoes]

Another example that it is a fallacy to equate evolution with progress.

[snapcaster]

In the age of AI, i'm never using obscure languages again because AI isn't as good with them

[massung]

By that logic, if modern LLMs existed in the 80s, you’d have never learned Haskell, Ocaml, Rust, Go, Erlang, … and all the cool concepts and ideas that came with them. You’d still be programming Basic and Fortran, simply because that’s all the models knew.

AI may be helpful at times, but to limit one’s self to only the knowledge and experience they have is… short sighted at best.

[johnisgood]

Feed it documentation and example code and given sufficient data of these, it will do just fine with obscure languages. I have tried it with programming languages as obscure as Odin, for example, and it worked nicely. It is way more awful writing Forth, for one. YMMV.

[werdnapk]

Reinforces the A in AI... "artificial" intelligence. Actual intelligence could pick up a new language no problem.

[yndoendo]

Programming languages are tools in a toolbox. Use the proper tool for the job instead of always picking up the hammer.

It takes time to train and use a new tool. That applies to LLM and humans. Would you use the same drill to hang drywall and core through a concrete floor?

[nolok]

Object pascal is many things, obscure it is not

[panki27]

Some things never die. I'm pretty sure the Borland Database Engine that came with Delphi 7 ('97?) still runs on Windows 11.

[zeroc8]

Nobody writes Win32 desktop apps anymore. That is Delphi's main problem.

[pjmlp]

Yes they do, for example https://www.lab-services.nl/en/home

[baranul]

The world is a big place. Many people and companies do things differently. And if it was really a problem or not profitable for Delphi, they would stop. That speaks for itself.

[gerardatkonvo]

As much as I love Object Pascal (it was my first programing language) it has no reason to exist in 2025 other than legacy applications and small RAD windows programs.

[DanielHB]

Lazarus (kinda of a Delphi clone that also uses Object Pascal) is probably the best way to make cross platform native desktop applications that actually uses the native GUI toolkit for each platform.

I hear it is quite popular for creating GUIs wrappers for CLI tools.

[pjmlp]

Ironically Delphi and C++ Builder are in a much better shape than Microsoft stacks in what concerns Windows applications.

They are the main product, not something that is seen as cost center nowadays.

Also they cross compile to all major desktop and mobile OSes.

[master-lincoln]

Strong opinion, but no evidence provided.

[andsoitis]

> and small RAD windows programs.

You can also use Delphi to produce Android, iOS, macOS, and Linux apps. All from single code base.

[maest]

This page looks like AI slop. I don't understand what I'm supposed to get out of it.

[CodeCompost]

Delphi is dead. Nothing to see here. Move along.

[1899-12-30]

Delphi sucks, I don't recommend anybody use it when you could just use c#.

[nolok]

I hardly disagree with the first part of your statement, but the second half it should be noted that Microsoft hired the designer in chief of the delphi language at the time to design c#

[lo_zamoyski]

Some make the case that making basic UIs has actually regressed since Delphi/Visual Basic.