Embarcadero: we are not interested in small developers (following the results of the “world tour”)

Since 1995, I have been programming on Delphi, I have always promoted Delphi in every way, in general, an ardent supporter of Delphi. But, having visited Ebarcadero World Tour, I came to the conclusion that all programmers need to relearn from Delphi on C. Because Delphi is still a dead end road. For many years, Delphi’s opponents tried to prove it to me. And it was possible to prove to the people who Delphi promote to the masses.

First of all: the company Ebarcadero does not like small developers. They are interested only in large companies that buy from them many expensive licenses for development tools. And here comes the time for the sadness of programmers who bet on Delphi: the cheapest license for Delphi costs $ 900 (at the same time, the newest Visual Studio from Microsoft can be obtained for free, thanks to the BezSpark program). Embarcadero has closed all of the developer incentive programs to use their products that Borland had. Now Delphi is only for rich companies. Unlike Microsoft, which strongly supports small developers and encourages the use of their products to create programs. And this means that we have made a huge mistake, programming for so many years at Delphi and not wanting to relearn at Visual Studio. But who knew ten years ago that everything would turn out that way ...

Further: having looked “what have done in the new Delphi” in terms of programming under Windows 8, I saw everything that had been built into Visual Studio for a long time. Well, the ways to circumvent inconsistencies resemble an attempt to shoe a flea with the help of a huge sledgehammer.
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Of the benefits: in Delphi, you can now develop programs for Macs. To test and debug these programs, you still need a Macbook, but the development process itself and the management of the debugging process come from Delphi under Windows. And it seems that there are already people who use this opportunity to port their programs under Macs.

Also, with two mouse clicks, you can stylize the shape of your old application into the Windows 8 style. There is no way to convert back - the process is one-sided. Before conversion you should suggest the user to backup the project or copy the converted project to another directory (it would be logical to add such a feature). The resulting application is not a full-fledged Windows 8 application, it remains a desktop application. But it looks like the application Windows 8.

The visual data binding system has not added anything new. All this has already happened, but now it is built right into Delphi and allows in some cases to reduce the amount of manual code.

In general, the conclusions are as follows: if, before the conference, I was thinking about purchasing a new version of Delphi, then after the conference I refused this thought and seriously thought about switching to Visual Studio. With the purchase of Delphi by Embarcadero, Delphi's language is transformed by the efforts of Embarcadero into a programming language for large programming companies and ceases to be a programming language for small companies and individuals. It's a pity.

You should go to the conference of the “world tour” - in order to understand where Embarcaderro and Delphi are going. And decide for yourself - whether along the way with them further.