Why we need to avoid Delphi
. Yesterday I met someone who is complaining about how expensive Delphi is that he couldn't afford to purchase it anymore. He had asked Embarcadero to lower the price and make Delphi becomes affordable again to education, hobbyist, and indie developers. Yet, Embarcadero ignored him again and again. I've seen this more than once occurrence. Here's what I said to him…
These days most development tools –compilers or interpreters, IDEs, libraries, plugins– are either open source, free, or cheap. Java, Swift, Python, JavaScript, Go, Kotlin, PHP, you name it… are free and open source. Even Microsoft is offering many of their developers tools for free and open sourcing some of them. There is one or two reasons why it's going that way (which needs another thread to discuss it).
Delphi's pricing and business model are obviously not for students and teachers, hobbyist, nor indie developers. Embarcadero is clearly targeting enterprise developers market which have a lot of money. If you're not in their target market, well… shame on you. Their free version product is just a sneak peek, a teaser. They don't want you to create real apps using the free version.
If you want to study Pascal programming, stop whining and use Free Pascal and Lazarus IDE. Pascal as language is larger than Delphi. For educational purpose, Free Pascal and Lazarus IDE are more suitable because you can dig down deep into the code and study how all the things work. And, if you're not in Delphi's target market, I suggest you to either use Free Pascal with Lazarus IDE and avoid Delphi as much as possible; or use another language entirely.
Unless –of course– if you don't mind to spend some great amount of your (company) money, you may use Delphi happily. 😊 Most programmers who couldn't afford to purchase Delphi go into the dark side, pirating and cracking Delphi, which is another reason to avoid Delphi altogether.
Oh… and please stop praising Delphi as the best tool ever. It's non-sense. Well, it used to be, but it's no longer now. Today there are many developers tools out there that are as good as Delphi or even better. Whether you admit it or not, it's not relevant and doesn't change the fact.
I've abandoned Delphi since about 10 years ago and completely switch to Free Pascal and Lazarus IDE, without any regrets. Well, of course both are not perfect, just like Delphi is. As any developers tools, you need to learn how to use it, workaround the flaws, and maximize its potentials. But I can assure you, Free Pascal and Lazarus IDE today is more than good enough to create real (commercial) apps for any platforms you can imagine.
I hope this will encourage you –and anybody else out there who's considering to learn or use Pascal– to use Free Pascal and Lazarus IDE, and avoid Delphi. Unless you can really afford it. 😉
Happy coding! :)