My company currently develops all their applications in Delphi. The syntax is nothing like I've ever seen, and from what I know (I just graduated college, so not much), barley any tech companies develop their software with Delphi. God knows why, but Delphi doesn't support basic things like garbage collection and, this is the worst, there is no native support for regular expressions. It's probably just a personal bias because I do like C++ which also doesn't have garbage collection and (I think) doesn't support regexes either. I just wrote a program to parse through inconsistent text without regexes; worst experience ever.

Anyway, I want to know from a RAD perspective, is Java or some other OO the language to use instead of Delphi?

I used Delphi on a small project a long time ago, (1997) perhaps it's changed, but Delphi is a client/server rad tool that allows you to build thick client (Windows) applications. Because it's thick client there is no need for garbage collection. I'm not really sure of what all your project entails, but if all you're doing is parsing through text then Delphi would not have been my first choice. (Perl, Java or C++) Being more of a RAD client/server tool, I don't think you can really compare Delphi to Java or C++. I would compare Delphi to Sybase's Powerbuilder, both are IDE's that help you build Windows client/server applications.

I'm not really sure of who uses Delphi but I do know that CDW used to... not sure if they still do or not though. I'm sure there are other companies out there but I would guess that they are mostly commercial software vendors. Possibly a few larger companies are using it as an enterprise solution but it's hard to say.

I used to program a lot in Delphi. Due to the way Borland handled it, it became less popular with programmers. It's still used, however.

Delphi now supports both their former method of programming and it supports a .NET which does include garbage collection.

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Originally Posted by jstrike

I'm not really sure of what all your project entails, but if all you're doing is parsing through text then Delphi would not have been my first choice. (Perl, Java or C++) Being more of a RAD client/server tool, I don't think you can really compare Delphi to Java or C++.

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I forgot I posted this.

Well I did finish the project (today) and man was it tough. All I was doing was parsing text, building a SQL insert statement and porking all the data into a database. For the past year I've been coding in PHP and have come to love regular expressions, well Delphi doesn't support that and there's no third party libraries to reference. The program I wrote barely works, and if they change a single character in the data the program will crash.

I have brought up using Perl as a conversion tool and my boss likes it. I think that was the original purpose of Perl anyway, to read and parse data.