Over the years I’ve programmed
in a variety of languages including a few in the ‘C
family’ such as Java, C++ and C#; a few in the ‘Pascal
family’ such as Pascal, Object Pascal, Modula-2
and Oberon; and a few others that don’t seem to
fit into neat little family groupings such as Smalltalk,
Prolog and, more recently, Ruby.
My programming life began in earnest with Turbo Pascal.
This was a DOS-based system which managed to squeeze
a compiler and editor into a 39K file. I’ll say
that again – its compiler and editor fitted into
a 39K (that’s K for Kilobyte) file! By Jove! They
knew how to do tight programming in those days!
Back then, Borland software had three great qualities:
it was small, it was fast and it was cheap. None of these
descriptions apply to software from Borland in recent
years. I see that the Architect edition of The Borland
Developer Studio takes up over 853 Megabytes of my disk
space; it costs $3,490 (even the cheapest edition costs
$1,090) and it takes over 50 seconds just to load (this
on a 2.8GHz PC with 1Gb of RAM).
OK, OK, I’ll be the first to concede that there
is a heck of a lot more in the mighty Borland Developer
Studio than there was in little old Turbo Pascal 3.2.
And frankly, quite a lot of that stuff I could do without.
Personally, what I’d like most of all is a version
of Delphi that is faster, smaller and a Hell of a sight
cheaper than anything currently on offer from Borland.
With the announcement earlier this years that the Borland
developer team (‘DevCo’) will be leaving
the mother ship and going off to explore new quadrants
of the programming cosmos (ideally funded by some, as
yet unknown, rich benefactor), there is the opportunity
for them to get back to what Borland always used to be
good at – lean and mean development tools.
I hope there will be at least one edition of Delphi
which will be priced at a level that non-corporate developers
can afford. Back in the early ‘80s I was an impecunious
amateur – which is why I chose the cheap Turbo
Pascal rather than an expensive C compiler. For far too
long, Borland’s high-end pricing has made its developer
tools inaccessible to the ‘next generation’ of
programmers.
Wouldn’t it be great if one day soon we were to
see a ‘Turbo Delphi’!
