Delphi Money Flows

Correspondent from New York

Delphi MacroEconomics

An interesting article came upon a beloved Delphi lover. You can read the blog post and then come back to this blog.

The problem with Delphi goes like this: (See the above picture).

Money flows into the business from ShareIT, Plimus or RegNow or DigitalRiver or supported indirectly from sales of other products.

The business owner then makes decisions to hire developers (or expand if one person). But the problems are not with buying Delphi itself. It is the Delphi experience which is completely suicidal.

The developers are screwed by Delphi yearly upgrades. So that is US$499 less or depending on where you live, Euros 499. Then the person has to reserve money for components because of poor quality or otherwise. For example, some people skip lunch, cable, etc. just to get better looking components and aesthetic grids, edit controls and better report writer(3).

The causality of this, is Delphi Magazines (what Delphi Mag?), Delphi tutorials sites (which have mostly wrong information) which complain they are not getting enough Delphi-related revenues.

The main problem of this, is there is no correct answers for ActiveX (e.g., as in OLE servers, in-process OLE servers that actually work), ActiveX or FireFox controls or IE8/9 Add-ons, correct working database drivers.

Half the time you see almost invalid codes on Torry's, DelphiPages or searching Google/Groups itself. This is because the code is since 2000, which may not be applicable for Windows 7. The joke is most of the codes is written for Delphi 5/6 era and not updated for Unicode, Windows XP (code examples work well on Windows 95/98/ME), most of the TLBs have been updated since then, most of the code is untested, so you go around from one tutorial site to another tutorial site and then to component vendor to another component vendor wasting more time and money.

When you want answers from the newsgroup/Embarcadero forums, you spend most of the whole day waiting for 1 meaningful answer to resolve your question. This would have been easily fixed by updating their Delphi help files. Nope, there is no updated examples. The joke goes: How do the compiler writers or Developers in Embarcadero do test-cases to test the Delphi compiler? They do absolutely nothing to ensure that code outside (open-source or otherwise) work with the latest compiler; nor do they seem interested to force an update on Torry's or Delphi-pages or Delphi Tutorial sites to update their content.

Not to mention trolling on the Delphi newsgroups. That is the #1 reason why Delphi developers quit. This is completely suicidal for Delphi developers to confront the trolls. Calling Jonna Carter a witch(1) (note the spelling mistake) or questing Jennifer Ashley(2) about Delphi which has nothing to do with the question asked.

When you want to train others, the Delphi external content writers have this per-copy license of their books, or require a group license. Same for the magazine owners too. With per-copy license with Delphi components, Delphi itself and annual updates, the costs starts to escalate dramatically.

Since a solution comprises of a Delphi App. with components embedded inside it, the problem arises for finesses of purposes. Since the product changes and business needs evolve constantly, there is the 2nd year issue. Since all Delphi components are per-yearly subscriptions, they have to start paying over and over again.

Consider this:
a) A WordPress solution and website (with WordPress Add-ins) is almost completely free and low-cost.
b) An IntraWeb/Delphi custom website would take forever to develop, has no scalability, high costs, needs many libraries to compile, need many database-components, other components to make a website.

Which would the end-user choose? WordPress for their content management system(4), leaving Delphi developers to focus on an obsolete Win32 market.


So it becomes a vicious cycle of less and less money: The first priority goes to the Delphi third-party component vendors who charge a pretty penny for shoddy codes, That in turn, reduces the wages of Delphi developers or forces business owners to consider cheaper alternatives which actually work (such as C# or VB.NET) and for the nay-sayers who say C#/VB.NET is dead, why are there so many books and jobs for them?


Since the greedy vendors want more and more money each year, that translates to less and less wages for the developers. Since that limits the number of people they can hire, the jobs market shrink. When the jobs shrink, the number of books available shrink.

(Is being a Delphi developer career suicide?Photo Credit: Delphi CodeMonkey Blog)

The vicious cycle continue with Java (and it's hundreds of certified production ready classes and ready-made business solutions) and NET (with tons of examples and business-ready solutions all over the internet). New developers coming out from school are trained in Java or NET because their professors or lecturers respond to the industry. How many Delphi jobs are there? Do you train the graduate class of '2012 or '2013 for Delphi when there are no jobs for Delphi in the nearest 50 miles of the University? That would be madness.


The problem is not being the coolest person or being using the coolest language. It is rags to rags, rags to even more rags story. Normally, you would work hard to become a rags to riches story. With Delphi, it is more-of-the-same.


(1) http://delphihaters.blogspot.com/2011/09/former-teamb-member-joanna-carter.html
(2) http://delphihaters.blogspot.com/2011/09/qa-dept-help-wanted-sarcasm-and-useless.html(3) https://forums.embarcadero.com/thread.jspa?threadID=49695
(4) http://magstags.com/wordpress-seo/wordpress-popularity/