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The coming of age of Delphi

Thursday, December 02, 1999

Today Delphi can get a legal drivers license in the U.S. She is 16 years old! She has had two name changes! She started out as Turbo Pascal created by Anders Hejlsberg and licensed and marketed thoroughly successfuly by the legendary yet much maligned Phillipe Kahn. She was a prodigy! Everyone loved her. She was so small and yet so swift and graceful at every thing she chose to do. All those ugly mega compiler writers looked at her and wept with jealosy and rage! The wise ones predicted that she was destined to reach greatness!

Then she became Borland Pascal. Even though she was still beautiful she was suffering as a growing kid and also loosing some baby teeth. She had a difficult time defending herself at times against other nasty (sometimes devious) kids on the block and big bullies. These kids would use pointers in the most horrifying ways and in her purity she couldn't bring herself to fight on their terms or deal with their headers. Pot shots by jealous and mean folk in the media and boardrooms made her sad and restless. Then she was just being ignored and the newer, flashier visual kids who lacked much substance were getting all the noise and attention. She was ready to grow up!

Then she became a teenager! She had muscle, speed and oh yes, TClass! She was given a most fitting name! Delphi! Intelligent, holding wisdom of the ages and yet humble and most giving to all who made friends with her. The world was excited and yet nervous. But her first attempt at going to 32bit and sharing the backend compiler with C++ was a little difficult for her. She had to strike a tough balance between her childhood limited to segments of 64k and the virtually unlimited vast open spaces of upto 2 billion bytes in one chunk. Ah! the growing pains.

But she adapted and inherited so well that we were once again in awe! She has always been supple but well endowed where appropriate! She has always had a refreshing and charming manner about her. Of course the mind behind the beauty is in a TClass by itself.

Oh and did I tell you, she is has had specialized training and is very adept at handling and marshalling reptilian and dangerous things like CORBA through the Open Standards. She also is one of the best known handlers of proprietary giblets like COM, DCOM, OLE, ActiveX and all other mutations of the same virus.

With databases she is like a hot knife through butter! She client-servers with breathtaking ease and multi-tiers like no other! Just a few clicks and you can see your wildest ideas brought to reality! But enough of all these exclamaitons.

Today she is a breathtakingly gorgeous teenager! Her popularity is at an all time high. Those with lesser courage continue to stay with the big bullies and suffer at the dictatorial machinations but the brave, the smart and those with a desire to be the leaders of their pack are coming back to her friendship and enjoy her endless gifts and charms. Of course, we, the real friends never left her side even when the going was rough :-).

These are exciting times. She is ready to leave the closed walls of the DOS and Windows environment wher she spent most of her childhood and grew up to be the beauty she is today. She is getting ready for her first date with this supposedly very cool new kid on the block, Linux! I'm telling you Mr. Linux this is the best thing that could ever happen to you so you better treat her __REAL nice or she will XOR you without even using a register and you will be relagated to a __FAR __FAR place where no pointer has gone before!

In closing, I am happy to be a friend, confidant and defender of Delphi. She is a wonderful sweetheart and adds hugely to my programming fun. May she live long and prosper!

Leo Singh
President InThink Corporation
Site Manager Delphi32.com
President AZ Delphi Users Group

(c) Leo Singh, 30-Nov-1999

About Leo Singh: Leo gets emotional, as above, about 3 times a year. Rest of the time he is busy with the above mentioned duties. He is available for high level design and consulting for large enterprise e-commerce applications using Delphi, the web and relational databases.

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