What Is Delphi?
I've been programming for a long time. My first introduction to programming was BASIC and Pascal in high school. From there I went on to college to receive a degree with a major in Computer Science. It was in college where I was introduced to a couple of Borland products: Turbo Pascal and Turbo C that ran under MS-DOS. They are compilers sold by Borland. Both products were owned by the Computer Science department and people would use them for special projects. I wrote some software in both, in fact on of the projects was for the Physics department. Later in graduate school, I purchased Borland Pascal and wrote some software in it. It was the big brother of Turbo Pascal. It had a small GUI that helped me develop some small Windows-based programs. Not long after, Delphi came and I was hooked!
Who Is Embarcadero?
Back in the 2000s, like most software companies, Borland was having a tough time. Borland decided to spin off the compiler branches of the company to a separate entity. They named that entity CodeGear. Unfortunately, that didn't last very long. By 2007, Borland was looking to divest itself of CodeGear. Along came Embarcadero. Embarcadero is a software company that was founded in the early 1990s that specialized in tools for databases such as Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase, and DB2. Embarcadero bought CodeGear outright and within a year would release RAD Studio. Delphi was part of that studio. Embarcadero has continued, since 2008, to improve the product over that time.
Delphi Starter
In 2011, Embarcadero had an interesting idea for getting new programmers to use Delphi. They created Delphi Starter. Delphi Starter was an introductory product that could only compile software for Windows (32-bit only). This allowed anyone to learn to program in Object Pascal and use the interface. Embarcadero had an end-user agreement that stated if you made above a certain amount of money ($1,000) or had a certain number of programmers using it (5) you had to buy the product. The cost, for a single user, is just over $1,000.
For people like me, who are more hobby programmers, that price is beyond what i would pay for something I don't really make any money with. But with the right sale, I could see myself spending half that to get the full product. The full product allowed you to develop software for 64-bit Windows, but also for iOS and Android and Linux!
But Then Embarcadero Flipped!
And then a month ago, Embarcadero decided to go all in for future developers! They changed the licensing and cost and introducted Delphi Communit Edition! This edition changes the end-user agreement to be $5,000 or more in sales per year. And now it included 64-bit, iOS, Android, and Linux! With this edition, you can write software with one of the most advanced IDEs (if not the most advanced) in existence!
Over the years I've programmed in a few IDEs. My favorite PHP editor was PHPEdit. I liked it because in Windows you could code PHP and use the built-in web server for the product. (Unfortunately, it appears the company behind PHPEdit has gone missing.) For Microsoft products, Visual Basic was my choice. Its IDE was pretty good, but not quite as good as Delphi. But the amount of sample code and help on the Internet is unparalleled. For me, once I'd experienced Delphi, all other IDEs had to beat it. And so far none has!
Learning Object Pascal is pretty straight forward. (I even wrote a book on it called Getting Started With Embarcadero Delphi.) There are plenty of tutorials out there - both paid and free. I highly recommend the ones on Udemy or Embarcadero Academy. Its also well known in educational circles that Pascal is one of the best languages to learn in. So if you already know C or Python, learning Pascal will be a breeze! But on the other side, Embarcadero also has their C++ Builder Community Edition with the exact same license agreement as with Delphi! So how can you lose?! You can't! I recommend downloading a copy and playing around. You won't be disappointed!