Delphi Programmers Take Heart

The father of Turbo Pascal and Delphi, Anders Hejlsberg, is also the architect of Microsoft's new language C#. The similarities of C# to Delphi are just uncanny. While COM was always a chore in C++ and unbelievably limiting in VB, Delphi really put MS to shame with its built-in language support for interfaces and rich hierarchy of classes you could descend from to create any type of COM object you wanted.

Delphi has always been the answer to the question, "how to I get the power of C++ with the ease of VB?" Now C# also falls into this category. This probably will make staunch Delphi supporters critical of C#, offering the "only now are they catching up" attitude. However, Delphi has long been a difficult sell to uneducated managers. While it would seem noble to "not give up the fight" and constantly strive to use Delphi wherever possible, this strategy can be be very limiting. Tools are tools. Its the ingenuity of people that make a project work. Delphi is a wonderful tool, yes. However, one should not box themselves in and limit themselves to only a single tool. If a manager is reluctant to go with Delphi, they probably won't have a problem with Microsoft's C#.

As a long-time Delphi supporter, I'm looking into C# as a new avenue to be able to develop with a rich programming language. As I mentioned before, the similarities to Delphi are uncanny and I am having little trouble picking up the language. Because Anders was one of the chief architects, the spirit of Delphi is very much alive and evident in C#.

I will continue to use and support Delphi whenever I can, but I am also excited at the opportunity to learn something new which may be more marketable than Delphi.

Just my $0.02.


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David Prothero
Owner / Consultant
Prothero Consulting
(209) 956-9180

Well, being a Delphi programmer from when it was first out, I was leery at first to move away from Borland's Products for development. After doing abit of reading up on it (as well as finding out that Anders was a lead man) I have got to say that I am actually looking forward to adding the C# environment to my programming skills. It also gives me a reason to actually install Win2K on my workstation since it won't run on Windows98.

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-Dan