For an aside, I like the comment about the developer being unapologetic about using Delphi for development.
The unfortunate thing about the argument for what makes a programming language productive (dense language or the libraries available to it), is that the argument is strongly rooted in open source, IMO, where the tools continue to be mostly deficient in the productivity department compared to working in a language environment like Delphi, where millions and millions of lines have held up to commercial rigor.
Delphi is a counter example to show that no matter what advanced language features are available to the programmer in another language, lisp, haskell, clojure, whatever, these languages still can't compete under commercial conditions with Delphi in a native win32 desktop environment. Delphi is the hemi engine of the legacy world, and would be a great candidate for integrating some advanced features to make it a good tool for ramping into a more advanced functional mindset.
I've written my share of Delphi code, and I've been sick of declaring variables, sections, typing begin/end, and writing a host of other tiresome cruft for a long time. But for development speed it really is hard to beat. Programmers who have been successful in the windows world expect the total package - language, libraries, dev environment. Maybe none of the three are perfect, but together they still make the alternative of just language and libraries mostly unacceptable under commercial conditions.
The unfortunate thing about the argument for what makes a programming language productive (dense language or the libraries available to it), is that the argument is strongly rooted in open source, IMO, where the tools continue to be mostly deficient in the productivity department compared to working in a language environment like Delphi, where millions and millions of lines have held up to commercial rigor.
Delphi is a counter example to show that no matter what advanced language features are available to the programmer in another language, lisp, haskell, clojure, whatever, these languages still can't compete under commercial conditions with Delphi in a native win32 desktop environment. Delphi is the hemi engine of the legacy world, and would be a great candidate for integrating some advanced features to make it a good tool for ramping into a more advanced functional mindset.
I've written my share of Delphi code, and I've been sick of declaring variables, sections, typing begin/end, and writing a host of other tiresome cruft for a long time. But for development speed it really is hard to beat. Programmers who have been successful in the windows world expect the total package - language, libraries, dev environment. Maybe none of the three are perfect, but together they still make the alternative of just language and libraries mostly unacceptable under commercial conditions.