I know it is not entirely a programming question, but I posted it here because Delphi programmers use this forum.
Why did Borland kicked off Delphi? The father of now famous Visual Studio, where did it get buried? Is it still widely used and how easily available is the community support?
No it is not.
Borland let it go, but it found a new house.
Versions 2009 and 2010 are very promissing. We now wait for 64-bit support. But that is high on the prioritylist.
I use Delphi daily on a professional basis. So delphi is not dead. But if you consider the literature you can buy for delphi, the amount of open source projects using delphi, the amount/status of libraries you want to use, the amount of job applicants that actually have delphi experience, you'll have to conclude that delphi is only a minor programming language now.
If I had to start a new, commercial grade project, I'd advise against delphi except in very special cases.
Has a programming language ever died?
There is still a very large ecosystem surrounding Delphi which will last for a very long time, delphi/pascal skills will always be a valuable asset for years to come.
I went to a very interesting 'briefing' on Delphi 2010 in Manchester the other day. Pawel Glowacki did a great job of wading through all the new stuff (a show of hands around the room revealed a lot of people on D5-D2006, a few of us on D2007 and fewer still on 2010).
Delphi's days of being popular/trendy might have long gone (if indeed it ever had any) but the product continues to be developed, continues to be an excellent tool for the job of developing Win32 apps, and enjoys a small-but-loyal core support amongst developers and great 3rd party component publishers.
Pawel mentioned that Mac-platform support was coming and I have to say that it seems to me Embarcadero have done as much in the last 18 months or so as Borland did in the whole time between them changing back from Inprise to selling it off to Embarcadero. I think Delphi is finally in the hands of people who want it to succeed (the CEO of Embarcadero used to be a Delphi developer). I'll continue to pony-up my software assurance money every year, my whole software-development business depends on my 20-year investment in Delphi/BPO7/Turbo Pascal.
I don't think it's dead at all, and even though there are surely many other more popular platforms to work on, I don't see Delphi dying off any time soon - it's simply too good at what it does.
NO! Even though many would want it to be dead. Microsoft bought almost all of the talent behind Delphi, but not all. Delphi has a new home, new talent (Barry Kelly and others) and hopefully new developers.
It's not dead, but still seriously ill. Till now, the wrong medicament has been given - some meausures of Linux, some of .NET - and both failed. But the much needed transfusion of 64-bits has still been delayed, as Unicode was. IMHO with the proper treatment it could survive and live well, but it would need the right healers. Borland kicked off Delphi because they believed the IDEs were "commoditized" and that the ALM stuff was where money were - or maybe just because selling the company to Microfocus was easier without the dev tools. But most of the people who mismanaged Delphi at Borland are still there at Embarcadero. And I am afraid they are going to repeat the same mistakes.