Borland Software’s Developer Tools Group is moving back to the company’s roots and relaunching its Turbo brand of products – offering the tools both for beginners and nonprogrammers, as well as for professionals. Borland officials said the company is bringing back its Turbo brand of tools as a set of low-cost, language-specific rapid application development tools for students, hobbyist developers, occupational developers and individual programming professionals.
I like the product rollout, great idea. Its good that Borland finally remembered what made them big to begin with, smalltime developers who bought great tools at good prices!
Reading the article title made me remember the good ole’ days of hacking away with Turbo Pascal. OMG I feel so old suddenly. *shudders*
I think it’s a good move.
We almost all used Turbo tools before. They were so great and so easy to use. I really hope it will work for them this time. The past 10 years hasnt been easy for Borland.
Good luck!
Most of Visual Studio 2005 Express is now freeware, so Borland will have their work cut out for them if they want to convince beginners and small-time developers to pay for Turbo products. Of course, competition is a good thing, so I’m looking forward to it. Visual Studio is good but still a bit rough in spots.
They don’t need to convince anybody to pay anything for the tools. They’re going to be free versions available as well the Under-$500 Pro versions. It looks like it might be a chore to use third-party addon components with the free versions though.
The only thing I can think about this topic it that Borland guys are unable to produce something new and revolutionary.
It sounds like the radio station that does not have more new songs and needs to replay all its repertory again.
A crappy marketing idea rather than engineering.
I’d say they are finally listening, Delphi users have been crying for something like this for years, not wanting to buy a over $1500 dls IDE with features they don’t need or use, with this sub 500 dls Turbo Edition users will raise again.
Personally, if I was this group, I’d charge $299 for a copy of this; include 20 free technical support calls, setup a free forum where by engineers and customers can ineteract, and have a modular interface to allow the parent company and third parties to create ways to extend the IDE so that it supports more languages out of the box.
Many companies it seems are more worried about money, when, IIRC, there was quite a good comment made by a CEO, “Focus on the products, and the profits will follow” – make a good product that is reasonably priced, and you’ll find people are more than happy to pay a few hundred for it; make like value for money.
The above seems like the obvious, but for too many CEO’s, they seem to have lost touch with reality once they start getting paid $200,000+ incomes and failing to mingle with the ‘little people’ and the ‘unwashed masses’.
One of the advantages of Delphi over something like Visual Studio is that the GUI side in Delphi is far more mature and less buggy. I’ve tried to write GUI software using C# and Visual Studio and it was more difficult. Winforms is surprisingly primitive compared to the VCL. One problem for example is that the docking layout in VS is buggy, at least in 2003. Also little things like getting icons on to buttons, something which should not take more than 5 seconds to do is unnecessarily complicated in VS. Developing toolbars, other than the MS sanctioned ones is also difficult in winforms, etc. I’ve tried to switch to VS but it proved not to be quite as productive as the marketing makes out (of course infinitely better than MFC).
To those who say that they’re not producing something new and revolutionary, what matters in the end is software development productivity not how shinny it is. After having tried a number of other environments including things like QT and NetBeans, I find Delphi more productive tool for generating user software. This might explain where there are comparatively so few Java GUi apps simply because for many people it’s too much work. For server apps it might be a different story.
I totally agree, the first time I tried Winforms due to the hype I said to my self “Waith a minute, I’ve been doing this for year with Delphi and in a easier way”.
i agree with the remarks about usability, i love the Delphi UI, much easier to program for me, although i think it’s subjective as im sure a lot of people will prefer the VS UI.
However stability is not Delphi’s strong point as it’s usually a rollercosta ride. Delphi 3 excellent product, delphi 4 bug ridden PITA, delphi 5,6,7 again good products although the .net stuff in 7 was patchy. However 8 had gone back to being a little unstable.
Out of all of them i still prefer delphi 6, pretty much stable and quite quick aswell.
Nice thing about delphi is the components are usually well written. The language strikes a nice balance for new users and pro’s, and ive found the EXE’s (win32) one of the fastest compiled.
I hope Borland is REALLY going back to it’s roots with their turbo products, as they are very funcational and well designed and personally i find Delphi the fastest and best RAD software out there.
It would be nice if they went cross platform (Win/Mac/Linux), in a better way than Klyix.
One of the things I remember best from the Borland tools from back then is the license. I still think it’s one of the most user friendly commercial licenses ever. Unlike other licenses used at that time, and unlike todays “give us your first born” type of licenses. The “No nonsens license” gave the feeling you had bought something and not just leased it. It basicly said you could install as many times you wanted and wherever you wanted, but not use more than one copy at the time.
Turbo Pascal was my first real programming language and ide. Unfortunately Borland failed to bring 32bit editions of tp to DOS and since i was in to game and demo programming i had to learn C. Watcom was my choise of compiler back then. I nagged to my friends for a long time about the beauty of Pascal but eventually gave in and went whit the flow
Nowadays i am completely ok whit C and related languages.
I cut my teeth learning to program in Borland tools. Turbo Pascal, Turbo Basic, Turbo C++, Borland Pascal, Borland C++.
It took me several years before I toched any MS tool.
So I hope that they are able to get back into the development tools game.
Back in the early 80s, I bought Microsoft Pascal instead of Borland, even though it cost probaly three times as much. I thought that since Microsoft made the OS, Microsoft Pascal was the official Pascal.
Boy! What a mistake. And I think I’m the only one that bought it.
Great stuff 🙂 hopefully they will rip out all the stuff that comes in modern IDEs and go back to that blue background simplicity .. Turbo Pascal and C are the IDEs i used at college and they were great… im not a developer and never coded anything other than scripts since those days… i have found it hard to use the new fully featured many icon’d IDEs today, i need to learn both an app and a language before i can go not in them days, one button to compile and another to step through .. easy (well not the coding part) .. mabey this will lead me back to having a go at some code now if its really basic
…