[DUG] What is the future for Delphi programmer?

[Jolyon Smith]

> For most software, even small iPhone apps, by far the biggest 
> cost is going to be the time spent by the developers

You are thinking of the iPhone developer community as a formal software
development house.

But, as someone else pointed out, the majority of iPhone app developers are
small developers.  Possibly one man shops.  And "shop" could be stretching a
point.  Bedroom/hobby coders in many cases I should think.

"Time" for such people is essentially free.  Even if you or I ascribe some
notional value to their time, it is not a factor that shows up on their
bottom line, at least not when they are getting started.

A Delphi license (and subsequent upgrades or SA renewals) may not seem like
much when it's your boss or the accounts department placing the order, or
when you have an established license revenue stream, but when it is coming
out of your own pocket, after taxes, to provide a tool with which you intend
to build something that may or may not be successful (and which you may
never even finish) it's an entirely different proposition.


> If one tool is 20-30% more productive then that is likely to
> easily make up that cost and more.

The extent to which tools now provide different levels of productivity is
difficult to measure I think, and is often confused with "feature lists".

The concept of the IDE was the single biggest contribution to productivity
in the last 20 years of this industry.  The bells and whistles shoe-horned
into the IDE's (and frameworks) since contribute less to productivity in my
view than the diligence, skills and experience of the developer at the
keyboard.

Taking twice as long to create high quality code will be repaid scores and
possibly hundreds of times over in the years of maintenance of that code
that follows.

Tools the eliminate or reduce the time, or the opportunity, to think and/or
which reward coding in haste and maintaining at leisure (looking at you,
automated refactoring tools) are regarded as "productivity" tools, when ime
they are anything but.  They are positively *counter*-productive (only up to
a point, of course - I do not advocate that we return to punching out code
on card!!  Far from it).


But we should also remember that the free alternatives don't just mean the
seemingly sub-par Apple tools, but as someone else pointed out, also Visual
Studio C# Express + MonoTouch.