Today C# and a modern copy of Delphi is getting very expressive for a student /hobbyist to start out on with a $2,000 price tag to get started. I remember when you could get started at a 10th of the price with Delphi. And a very large array of small programs came about in all sorts of fields. The ones that come through that hobby level are ether working for people or people that have marketed their own product. Now we have P/Invoke as our future and MS plays the big daddy and markets it self. And thinks every one will tag along as little puppies. The truth is they are trying to set a standard that with out us tagging along MS will be in problems. At the same time MS has to address the future and as programmers Android devices will be 60% of the future world market and students will take them up fast. Why 1/ portable 2/ they communicate for the student in many more ways. 3/ price. As MS sales have dropped in resent years they will drop further and apple shears man are they about to fall real bad. To me windows XP will hang on because future sales will drop and I find average person thinks XP is complex enough to maintain !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And yes there is the power gamer out their and computers have just gone over the 4 gig barrier to 8 gig. But the least leap in size is wasted because of .net P/invoke with ANSSI and 64 bit pointers effectively using twice the space. 90% of users do not use 0.5 of a gig of memory and 70% of all users use English. There is clearly a limit to IBM programming power as proce4ssors only go so fast!!!!!!!. Android devices are using UTF-8 that is not supported by MS properly. UTF-8 is an extension of ACSSI that is so compatible with Delphi and those other languages, So I want to suggest this.
Create and market a freeware Delphi *.Dll called D/Invoke!!!!!!!!! 1/ UTF-8 to ACSSI interfacing. 2/ 32 and 64 bit platform for old XP computers and users that will never use more than 4 gig memory space. 3/ Write the Dll in Delphi that its not C++ compatible that .net cannot interfere with the standard. And a future consideration is communication with the Java JNI for Java communication. 4/ Create freeware code that links with Delphi 3 to Delphi 6 as some projects out already have done some work. Except in the area of threads. In may ways many projects will just need recompiling once everything in this project is sorted. Then all projects made with D/Invoke will run faster than .Net, use the best text system UTF-8, Be Future proofed better than .net, communicate to important languages like Java. And students can learn to develop at cheaper prices producing a big development base again.
What do people think!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!