Edit: Now that I've looked at their online store through a US proxy I see that they have: https://store.embarcadero.com/542/catalog/product.s3703/lang.... Not that the conditions are very good:
>If you’re an individual you may use the Starter Edition to create apps for your own use and apps that you can sell until your revenues reach $1,000 per year. If you’re a small company or organization without revenue (or up to $1,000 per year in revenue), you can also use the Starter Edition. Once your company's total revenue reaches US $1,000, or your team expands to more than 5 developers, move up to the Professional edition with an unrestricted commercial license.
The upgrade from Starter to Professional costs $899.00.
Having learned Turbo Pascal before C, I never liked C, given the capabilities of Turbo Pascal.
Type safety, blazing compile times, modules, system level programming, objects.
Management killed Borland products thanks to their continuous change of brand, lack of investment on Kylix and Anders going to Microsoft.
Most customers became reluctant to keep investing on their tooling.
But they misjudged the market, and invested in products like Visibroker and Midas (and dead-end tech like CORBA), not really understanding what they ought to be building.
(This wasn't the beginning of their troubles, though. They bungled a lot of decisions before then, especially with the purchase of dBase and Paradox, and the Windows version of Quattro Pro.)
I stopped using Delphi in the late 1990s, but even then I could see how it was heading towards obsolescence. Not the GUI development model itself, which was brilliant and which I sorely miss for OS X GUI development today, but Object Pascal.
Sure, Object Pascal is a good language, but it was very insular, not portable, often very Windows-specific, didn't integrate well with other things, and didn't evolve fast enough. I was able to work with C and C++ libraries, including Dialogic hardware APIs and Microsoft tech such as MAPI and TAPI, by writing a translator (htrans) that parsed header files into an AST and produced Object Pascal interface files for them. But it was very tiring. I had high hopes for C++Builder, but it was a major disappointment when it arrived. For one, it relied on a lot of proprietary C++ extensions.
I was using Delphi/Object Pascal for a lot a systems development, non-GUI backend stuff. It seems a bit quixotic today, but it was fun, and I liked the language. It sort of filled a particular niche that Java would overtake a few years later.
If you wanted to use Object Pascal today and not have to rely on Embarcadero for the continued support of your tools you could use Free Pascal and Lazarus, which are both free software (GPL-licensed). Unfortunately, there's bit of a stigma against using any variant of Pascal these days (to which, no doubt, the many crappy CRUD apps written in Delphi and Borland's management of their product have both contributed), so it's not a good choice for new projects, especially free and open source. I wonder if Nimrod could be the comeback of type-safe compiled languages that don't target the JVM.
Also someone was spreading rumours that all games were written in C/C++ so we had to move to it :)
When I learned assembly, and got my Ralph Brown's interrupt list (best thing ever back in the days) I went back to Pascal and made little assembly function for "movefile".
I remmember friend of mine, who just moved to "C" put all his code in the .h file - and it was compiling all the time. Back then having .TPU file and not having to write additional header file was very advanced compared to C/C++ - and the compilation times were much faster.
I think after they spent years developing C++ Architect and then chucking it in the bin, many of the developers jumped ship and Borland was left with few developers, a shell of its former self. They also had stupid products like their PHP IDE (I wonder how many they actually sold???) and as far as I know the company I used to work for is still making software using the creaking aging VCL! A large code base to rewrite is no fun!
A shame for Borland (or whatever they are called these days) but I am not inclined to buy this software.
I stared with programming with TURBO.COM (Turbo Pascal 3.0) - it was 33kb DOS executable and had built-in editor - fit on a diskette, and there was space for other things.
I skipped version 4 (Turbo/Borland Pascal) and had most fun with 5.0 and 5.5, then 6.0 was solid, and later it was the last time I've used Borland products - the first Delphi and that was it.
Turbo Vision (Borland's GUI for Text Mode - e.g. DOS) was very advanced. I've briefly tried OWL (C/C++ I think) - but had to move onto other things.
Then Delphi was very easy to build interfaces, and later when Microsoft snatched Anders Hejlsberg it kind of resurfaced in Microsoft's products. For example MFC's GUI editing was much worse (and still is) than whatever Delphi had 15 or more years ago (my opinion, I know too many MFC fans out there, and surely they still love it).
The guys responsible for those changes of brand killed Borland products. :(
POSIX was not as portable as they advertised.
