I recently asked, who or what are Embarcadero's target customer. I think Embarcadero have answered. Look at this press-release. Embarcadero All Access.
So, it's the Enterprise then. Maybe Embarcadero know something I don't. Maybe they'll target the medium to small businesses with some other scheme at a later date. I wait with bated breath.
When I first picked up Delphi 1, I was amazed. I could kick up a decent application in no time. Prior to Delphi 1, we designed user interfaces on 80x25 squared paper. Delphi was that big a leap! I found it really easy. I was a Turbo Pascal programmer before Delphi, so the syntax was familiar. The RAD, drag and drop paradigm was easy to pick up and run with. I had it made.
So, here I was creating applications with an Object Oriented programming language and tool, therefore I was an OO programmer. Right? Well, the only classes my applications had were the form classes created by Delphi when you add a new form to the application. My first applications were a mess, multiple forms, with 100s of components stuck on then. I didn't know better. When anyone in those days demonstrated the power of Delphi, they would open a form, put a menuitem, a few dialogs and a memo, then they'd write a line or two of code, and voila, they had created notepad. Wow. I can do that I thought, and I did.
As time passed, and moved to Delphi 2, I got better. First I moved all my database components to datamodules, but it was still a mess. No classes of my own to speak of, and global variables scatter everywhere. It was an improvement, but not by much. I was still writing procedural code. Moving onto Delphi 3, I discovered objects and classes. I ditched data-aware components, and learnt a bit about inheritance and polymorphism. I dabbled with interfaces, and started applying sound principles. Nowadays, I like to think I know what I'm doing, but still to this day I continue to learn. It amazes me that there is still so much to learn, but that's ok, it keeps it interesting.
So where am I going with this? Well, just because someone uses an object oriented language, it doesn't make them an Object Oriented programmer. The language, and the framework are just tools. It doesn't matter how good those tools are, in the wrong hands, they can cause havoc.
I've mentioned before in a few of my blog posts about the inexorable move towards .NET and away from Delphi at my place of work. I'm a lone voice in the wilderness pushing for Delphi, but when minds have been made, it's difficult to un-make them. One of the main reasons put forward by the .NET band, is that we'll find it easier to find developers if we ditch Delphi and go for .NET. It's true that each time we advertise for a Delphi developer post, we only get a few responses. It feels like we're scraping the barrel. It takes a long time to find a good Delphi developer. There's not many of us (notice how I subtly included myself in that statement!) Will it be easier to find C# developers? I'm sure for each post we advertise, we'll get 10s if not 100s of responses. Will they be any good? I don't know, but there will be a good percentage of them who, because they know a bit of C# will think they are .NET programmers. I think it's going to be just as difficult to find good .NET developers as it is to find good Delphi developers. We'll just have more CVs to throw away, and more interviews to go through, until we find the right people.
Right, before I write this post, a little disclaimer. I have nothing against Nick Hodges, I've never met him, but he sounds like a really nice guy, and someone who I'd have a lot in common with. The reason I say this, is I've noticed that quite a few of my posts have been about something he's either said, or written about. I hope he can take some of what I write about as constructive criticism.
Where was I? Ah, my friend Nick! I'll keep this one short. Isn't rule one of any business, to know who your target audience is? Does Codegear know who it's target audience is? I'll go back to Nick's appearance on show #13 of the Startup Success Podcast.
Is your market the large enterprise level companies?
I quote :
Or is it more the small to medium size business and hobbyist market?
I quote :
So which is it? Regional pricing, a sales force, and the fact that it seems (may or may not be true, but it sounds like it) to get the best price, you need to speak to a sales person are all perhaps what the Enterprise expects, but something everybody else seems to hate!
If you're aiming for the developer, the small to medium sized businesses, and the micro ISVs and the hobbyists, take it from me, they don't like pricing per region, and they absolutely hate talking to a sales guy. All they want, is to get the best price possible. Save the money you pay that sales guy (and pass on the saving to us of course), and just put the product somewhere where we can buy it with a minimum number of clicks, and at a reasonable price, one which is the same whether I'm in Angola or Alaska!
By all means target both groups, but have a distinct strategy for each.
Again, sorry Nick, I'm on your side.... Honest!!!!
I'm referring to something Joel Spolsky keeps telling Jeff Atwood (both of Stackoverflow) Joel says that even if you are not going to be programming in C, learning it will stand you in good stead. As much as I hate C (hate is perhaps too strong a word), I kind of agree with him. I was thinking about this in the context of garbage collection. Everybody seems to love garbage collection, and it seems to be the number one must have feature for Delphi. I guess the theory goes, if you don't have to think about freeing your objects, then your code will have less bugs in it, and thus by default you are a better programmer. Does it work that way? Not really. I recently had the misfortune to have a look at some Delphi code written by someone who clearly didn't know that objects were his responsibility. Objects were being created left, right and centre, and not being freed after use. There were a few attempts at freeing objects, but this was just a misguided assignment of nil to various objects. It was a mess, and the application leaked like a sieve (a colander for you Americans out there!) Would garbage collection have made his code any better? To be honest, I don't think it would. Ok, it would have freed the developer from the responsibility of freeing his objects, but he just didn't get the basics of being a programmer. His code would still have sucked. It would have leaked a little less for sure, but it would still have been a maintenance nightmare. And you know what, garbage collection would have probably masked the fact this guy didn't know what he was doing. His application would have worked. We'd perhaps have noticed further down the line when it is much more expensive to fix. Delphi wasn't as forgiving, and rudely protested with multiple access violations.
So, yes, garbage collection is cool, saves time and typing (40% I'm told), but I fear we're growing a generation of script kiddies (apologies to script gurus, who know what they are doing), who can get an application (albeit a small one) up and running, but have created an albatross around the neck of the next guy to inherit their code. So, yeah, C maybe a dying language, and pointer manipulation and managing your own memory maybe dying concepts, but learning the basics of how to program is essential, and it's these languages and concepts that best help you do that.
There's a perfect analogy in the world of (real)languages. Latin is a dead language, but for years, it was taught in schools, and students hated it, because it was of no use to them in every day life, or so they thought. The thing is though, so many modern languages are based on Latin, that anyone with a knowledge of Latin, is automatically a better linguist. His English, Italian, French, Spanish etc etc will automatically be so much better for having learnt Latin.
So by all means, let's have garbage collection, let's have all these coder aids, but let's not forget how to program.
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