Hey guys. I'm considering the possibility of studying Delphi as a language to code in. I'd like to know if anyone could tell me the advantages of Delphi and how it can be beneficial towards others.

Thanks in advance
~Dan

Well many of the advantages and disadvantages can be found right on wikipedia...

CodeGear Delphi - Wikipedia

Personally I have never seen it used very much. It was in a competition with VB there for awhile and they even had tv commercials really trying to sell it as a language for enterprise applications, but it never really has taken off.

I would never really invest an academic endeavor into it because who knows how long it will be around. I rather go with a more mainstream alternative and then go back to Delphi when you have some spare time on your hands.

Just to give you an idea, Borland tried selling off part of Delphi in Feb 2006 but I don't think they found a buyer and that caused them to instead just regroup into Codegear and push on. Now that is just speculation but no where in the industry am I seeing large spread Delphi development. Once in awhile you find a big company using it for database development (Delphi's strong point) but other than that... nothing really.

If you are just breaking into programming you might want to go with something like VB or another .NET language and later lateral over into Delphi.

I would just hate to see you waste your time with Delphi and be forced to bail on it because A) No more support for it or B.) Can't find enough work in it.

These are just my opinions and what I have seen in the industry. Hope this helps you make some choices.

It definitely did help make my choice quite frankly. Thank you very much for the reply and in depth information, mate.

Isn't it just a proprietary version of Pascal?

Hey, Nick Hodges the Delphi Product Manager here, and I thought I'd take a little time to square away a few misunderstandings....