March 28, 2011

The Best Delphi Ever

We received a really nice email from someone who evaluated RAD Studio XE so I thought I would share some of it...

I just wanted to let you know that this is the best Delphi ever !
I had just completed an evaluation of Delphi and C++ in RADStudio XE.

·         Your website is extremely professional and customer (developer) friendly.
·         Your online store and product registration is now working much better.
·         Your product strategy is coherent and is now starting to make sense again.
·         You product is extremely well rounded and smooth.
·         The partner pack is so complete it is a total shock for me to see that most of the tools and components I need is there. Thank goodness these Delphi die-hards just kept on improving and enhancing their components all this time.
·         A development environment is a culture:
o   The elegance and readability of the code (by humans!)
o   The structure and layout of the programming project.
o   The RAD and component philosophies  which cuts deeply in the way components should rapidly be snapped together.
o   The practical non-dogmatic approach of the Delphi language means that the developer does not have to fight constraints, inconsistencies, idiosyncrasies and ambiguities of the language model. It is neat , it is natural, it is quick!
o   I am amazed at the turbo speed of the IDE, the compilers, the everything!.
·         And finally, this is the most complete and affordable development environment in the world!
o   The time and money saved from just installing everything out of the box, is less that the money value of the time you will spend trying to put together something yourself from any free open source code.
o   The time it now takes again smacking together a fantastic high quality application is mind boggling.
·         I had no problem paying the license for this release. It is great great value for money!

10 comments:

Simon J Stuart said...

It is nice to see so many of the sentiments I imue towards Delphi so eloquently echoed in the words of others.

The "complete" nature of Delphi is by far its greatest strength, in that such diversity exists within its standard component set. This elliminates the need to manually source third-party libraries, or "suites", which - from a business perspective if nothing else - carries a sufficiently higher financial and chronological investment than the development environment and compilers themselves.

As RAD Studio expands to new frontiers, it becomes much more efficient for those of us developing products and services transceding the "application-only" barrier.

RadPHP offers hope of being able to produce the web-side of a product or service in the familiar (brilliant) environment we use to produce our software. Whilst (in my opinion at least) the current RadPHP offering is not 100% production-ready (in that the HTML markup it produces does not adhere to certain standards - such as the forced production of "style=" tags even when using templates/stylesheets), it is certainly a promising growth on the already-amazing RAD Studio product line.

The brilliance of Delphi Prism also must be stated, in that it allows those who wish to target the .NET framework to do so using the same familiar Delphi code we so enjoy producing.

Delphi itself benefits so much more than its rivals (I shall not name them, but we know who they are) in that its 3rd-party developer community consist of such talented and generous programmers.
Take that in context along-side the expansion of Delphi to 64bit, as well as Mac (and beyond in the not-so-distant future), and RAD Studio suddenly exceeds all of its rivals in every facet of development. This includes the efficiency of development, the syntactic joy of the Pascal language as compared to others such as C/C++, the wealth of quality 3rd-party components, libraries and complementing tools provided by the community, and the multi-platform/multi-target diversity of the existing-and-new compilers.

I have said for many years, and continue to this day, that anything you can make in a rival's development tools, I can make ten-times quicker in Delphi.

Too many people have asked "why use Delphi?"... the more appropriate question is "why should I use anything other than Delphi?"

Mason Wheeler said...

I assume this customer is from the USA? Because people from other countries tend to almost invariably describe the online ordering pricess in strongly negative terms.

I agree, though, that once you've actually got it up and running, Delphi's the best development tool you can get.

Simon J Stuart said...

Why was my comment deleted? :(
I didn't spam, I didn't post any links, my comments were not ony relevant, but sing the praises of both the individual who said such lovely things about Delphi, as well as the RAD Studio product line itself.

Tim said...

Hi Simon - that was the blog system's spam filtering at work. I marked your comment as Not Spam so it shows up now.

Anonymous said...

I strongly suspect that this email was written with tongue very firmly in cheek.

The complete lack of *any* form of negative comment or constructive criticism is deeply, deeply suspicious.

The observations and commentary not at all relevant to an evaluation of the product is equally suspect (are we supposed to believe that a complete comparative assessment of the Delphi language was undertaken by the correspondent in the evaluation period allowed by the license?)

What exactly is a "smooth" software product? Did the correspondent order a media pack? I suppose the disc in that could be described as "smooth" and indeed "extremely well rounded". Software doesn't come much more "well rounded" than in disc form!

And of course, clearly this individual was entirely oblivious to the about faces and changes in direction even recently w.r.t product strategy.


Obsequious and ill-informed praise is, sadly, only faint praise.

PascalBoy said...

I agree must have Been a USA Customer in my opinion. I say this for following reasons :-

(a) As already pointed out in this Thread the Buying process for many outside the USA is best described as 'Painful' I think.

(b) The reviewer states they find Delphi the 'most complete and affordable development environment in the World' . I would doubt many from Europe would Say that with a $1 = E1 pricing scheme as but one example.

PascalBoy said...

I also wonder if the quoted reviewer has read the XE License agreement . Hope they do not work outside his/her Licensed country (at time of purchase) for more than 30 Days or go and live in another country after purchase

See :-

http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/40786

Sections 2.1 (a),(b) and notes directly under them.

As to why there would be such clauses I will leave that to readers to decide ;)

Unknown said...

I think releasing the "Bold" framework would make it even more attractive for the companies like mine who already bought XE. Please post some information about its status or at least tell us if its dead.

Thanks

Anonymous said...

It is very nice comments but when can we have an enhanced compiler that has MODERN optimization capability comparable to other main stream C++ compiler? Aren't people aware Delphi's compiler sucks in generating optimized machine code?

Kyle A. Miller said...

Awe, that was a nice letter David I. put together. ;o)

Seriously, Delphi XE is the best Delphi ever. I wish it had made its appearance 5+ years ago. I'm not saying Delphi is 5 years behind. I am saying I wish the quality we see in the IDE today was there 6 versions ago. It has taken a really long time to get Galileo to where it needs to be.