Quote Originally Posted by billegge View Post
Maybe the confusion is in the standard we base our choice of tool on. Mine is that I want to use the best tool and that has many sub factors (deployment, speed, reliability in production(dependencies for example), language features, ...), some others decide based on employment - meaning the boss chooses. When one person argues about technology the other could care less. So, if someone uses VB I would predict that they don't use it for technological reasons and that whatever reason I say why you should use Delphi would be irrelevant to you.
That's a pretty good post. Frankly, there are plenty of examples where the innovative lost out to something less impressive for the simple reason that everybody embraced the less impressive for one reason or another. Still, the situation that I dread is getting back to the situation in the late 80s-early 90's where there was no most popular platform and everybody had to write for multiple platforms using multiple tools. Many developers couldn't afford to do that, or didn't want to, so they targeted one platform or another. For the consumer, if there was something you really wanted to use, but it wasn't written for your hardware...sucks to be you.

Perhaps the world should come together around something open like Linux, but I don't see that happening. For whatever reason, the world has currently come together around Windows, with a few percentage off on other platforms. That makes it easy to choose the platform to target. It looks like mobile is going to coalesce around Android, though that could still change. Still, if it happens, there isn't a clear winner when it comes to tools for writing for Android. As far as writing for Windows, there are a few clear winners for different scenarios, and Delphi isn't one of them. Perhaps the technology is superior, perhaps the IDE is stellar, but it is still a marginal language and experience should show that once marginal, languages tend to stay right there.

I program to make programs, too. It only became my employment years later. .NET has all the features, and I've had no issues, so I see no particular reason to change. The fact that I now work in a .NET shop means that changing isn't even an option, though.