Interview: David I talks Delphi

 

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Posted on 12 Jun 2003 at 15:47

David I: Yes, of course. Delphi will always retain its strong identity.

But you are also maintaining the principle that experienced programmers can drop down into the code and have complete control over their work

David I: Sure. Maybe in another 100 years we will have a perfect environment where you can design and model and figure out how to capture all of everything and from which you can derive a perfect running application without anything else... but there will always be specialised code that needs to be written. Whether it's to implement a certain method or capture a piece of hardware, some programmer is going to have to be involved.

It's reassuring for programmers to know they do have complete control...

David I: It's all about choice. Buy the pieces, use the pieces that you want. Do it all in code or do parts of it in models and parts of it in other things.

We don't proscribe a specific language for a specific use. You can build things in all the products we deliver and you build across development environments, across platforms, across operating systems, and across devices as well... Ultimately if you are a developer where your world is working with code, you can do that, through the Professional Edition and have at it. Eventually, you may want to do modelling and requirements...

And this is a Borland principle not a Delphi principle?

David I: Yes it applies to C++Builder, C#Builder, JBuilder and so on. There are enough companies that are trying to force people to get locked in and force them to use a specific language, a specific process, a specific back-end server, a specific platform or operating system.

Our customers - and I think most developers - want flexibility and freedom. And support for open standards. They want to be able to integrate with lots of disparate systems. And that is the luxury - the benefit, or the beauty - that we have at Borland. We are not an operating systems company, or a platform company. We are giving customers flexibility and choice. You can have what fits your needs as an individual developer.

It's a tough line to walk - not proscribing the use of tools through tie-ins. You have to be competitive?

David I: We are a company that has been around for 20 years, and we are competing very well with companies that are a hundreds of times larger than us. We are successful with Reader Awards and Choices, and such like. We continue to innovate and people know that Borland is an innovator. It's down to the foundations: share everything, integrate with everything,

The spirit of developers that don't feel constrained by some proscribed operating system 'religion' or philosophy. That allows developers at Borland to be as free as our customers want to be. It's unique position in the industry.

We talked earlier about consolidation in the industry, but even with consolidation there are always a few companies or individuals that think differently - to coin Apple's phrase.

We don't try to think differently for differently's sake, we try to think about how we can help solve customer problems. Whether it's making COM programming simpler, as we did with Delphi 3, or making Web programming simpler, or .Net programming or cross-platform development simpler. All these are what drive us to solve real problems, not just add syntactic sugar or add components for components' sake, and things of that kind.

You have mentioned the .Net Compact Framework. How do you measure the success of .Net?