Ah, Robert. How nice to have you back again! My own interpretation of recent events that may have contributed to a lack of postings:
1) CodeGear being bought by Embarcadero is still being digested by the community. Some of us see Embarcadero as a really different owner of CodeGear technologies. They sell very expensive tools to big businesses with pricing models that promote negotiation, price quotes, etc. rather than 'solid value for a fixed price, no strings attached" which was the Delphi model we all started with and loved. So suspicion remains. And that leads to wait and listen rather than post, post, post! 2) Delphi 2009 is a "breaking release" due to the unicode support. EVERYONE needs to check very carefully how they have been coding to be sure bugs have not been introduced when adopting this release. Not like past updates/upgrades. This makes everyone nervous and focussed on work rather than talk. 3) Confidence in CodeGear is wavering. That is partly due to both of the above two items. Nick Hodges started as Delphi PM with lots of confidence and said all the right things to bolster confidence in the community. Then he got bogged down in the reality inside CodeGear. Lost momentum. Initial push for better documentation has still now resulted in the quality that many expect. Bugs are still too long lived. Great example: Current problems with D2009 update 3 has frustrated many because it has been held up for months. (And Nick has not been able to say why. See above on "bogged down in internal realities at CodeGear.) And certain bugs being discussed online are not fixed in update 3. Maybe update 4. 3) Maturity of FPC/Lazarus offers an alternative that is at the same time compatible with Delphi and diverging from Delphi. The biggest fact here is proof that a cross-platform version of Delphi is entirely feasible and we wished CodeGear had done it long ago. (Kylix effort does not count because key parts of the technology were flawed and they didn't give it enough time to establish itself before they killed it.) We have lost some to FPC/Lazarus and they would rather converse about it that CodeGear products. 4) The growth of so-called "rich internet apps" has moved the industry's focus away from Win32 apps which are Delphi's forte. That means many people have looked at and adopted alternative languages. We have lost many who are now going down a different path. The remaining just don't need the conversations as much. 5) The overall economic climate is forcing many to rethink their careers. We have lost many who are now going down a really different path. 6) Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the community has many, many online forums available. Some have retained active memberships but several have all but ground to a halt. I've found the FPC/Lazarus lists and the EDN newsgroups to be active. The center of Delphi community has definitely shifted away from USA developers to groups in other countries (Russia, Brazil, Spain, BeNeLux, Germany). Many of them have their own non-English forums that have grown while the older forums have wained. Note: There are almost NO newcomers to the USA Delphi community. But I still see newcomers to the FPC community. _______________________________________________ Delphi mailing list -> Delphi@elists.org http://lists.elists.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/delphi
