Why do I choose Delphi?

I am fortunate that at my job, Delphi is the development platform that has been standardized on. In the company’s earliest incarnations, back in the 80’s, the language of choice was first Microsoft Pascal and eventually Turbo Pascal. During the last half of the 90’s the demand for our software to be available in Windows created the need to make what was looking like a tough choice. A large code base had been developed in Pascal and the prospect of abandoning that or attempting to adapt it to Visual Basic or Visual C was not appealing. It was very fortunate for us that at about this same time Borland released Delphi 1. Our decision was suddenly made for us… 22 years later and I still occasionally pull in units that were originally written in the 80’s.

Why do I choose Delphi?

For my own personal and open source projects I am able to share it with others via. the exercises I have made available to anyone willing to attempt them at Exercism.io. I recently took on the task of rewriting the Windows app that Exercism has been been using for some time. This has been a fun and educational task to work on. I have never needed to create a RESTful client before and that is exactly what the installer needed to be. The Delphi IDE has a very helpful tool, the RESTDebugger, that greatly reduced my learning curve and allowed me to complete the first version of the, Delphi powered, Windows Installer for Exercism Windows CLI in a short amount of time.