I remember, at a Borland conference in San Francisco, some time in the mid 90s, listening to the company’s boss, Philippe Kahn, waxing lyrical about object orientation while the software’s chief architect, Anders, Hejlsberg, admitted that he had been extremely reluctant to add all those ‘nasty objects’ to his lovely elegant Pascal.
Well, time moved on and so did both Kahn and Hejlsberg – the former branched out into mobile camera phones; the latter went to mess around with more objects than you could shake a stick at as Microsoft’s C# Chief Architect.
During that time, Borland and its software changed. The company become big and corporate and so, alas, did its software. These days when I install Borland’s Delphi the first thing I do is untick most of the setup options. If you go ahead and install all the stuff in Delphi Architect whenever you run the software you’ll end up sitting watching the thing load with the speed of treacle running uphill.
How many times, over the years, have I yearned for the good old days when Borland software was known for its speed: small, fast and inexpensive - these were the three great qualities of my first ever Borland compiler, Turbo Pascal.
Now that Borland has ‘divested’ itself of its developer team, there is, at long last, the hope that the team (informally known as ‘DevCo’) may once again be able to get back to where they were ten or so years ago. I am encouraged by the news that their latest product revives the ‘Turbo’ branding. I am even more encouraged that one edition will be free – that’s free as in zero cost, full functionality. There aren’t even any licensing restrictions on what you can build with it. From September 5th 2006 you will be able to download a copy of Turbo Delphi Express and use it to develop commercial applications.
If you feel a bit more flush with cash there will also be a Pro edition which, I am told, will set you back under $500. These are hopeful signs. Maybe the new group really will be able, once again, to put the focus on what programmers want and need.
The free Turbo Express product range will not only include Delphi for Win32 but also Delphi for .NET, C++ for Win32 and C#. I am told that it will only be possible to install one product on one PC, however. So once you’ve picked your preferred language that’s the one you’ll have to stick with. And you won’t be able to install any third party controls - the component palette is ’frozen’ - you get all the standard controls (quite a lot!) but you can’t add any more.
More information on http://www.turboexplorer.com (including an old video of Philippe Kahn waxing lyrical about objects, though this is only recommended for those of you with an exceptionally high tolerance of jazz-playing software executives…)
Incidentally, just in case you are new to Delphi, you may be interested to know that we’ll be running a series of Delphi tutorials on Bitwise to coincide with the launch of Turbo Delphi – ah, how I love that name! I never could say “Borland Developer Studio” with any degree of enthusiasm. But ‘Turbo Delphi’ positively trips off the tongue…
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