Tuesday, 12 August 2008

CodeGear sold to Embarcadero technologies

What was announced about two years ago , finally* happened in May, this year.
At first, when Borland software corporation announced that it plans to sell it's famous products, I could not believe it.
I kept asking myself "why? Is this possible?".

Many people started programming using Borland's tools. I am one of them.
This is the company which developed my favourite IDEs, and it's really hard for me to see it all breaking apart...

One of the strangest things for me was the fact that not many people ( as it should ) was using it's products, and ,at the other hand, many were using , for example, Microsoft Visual studio 6 instead!? ( I still don't know why it has this "Visual" in it's name??? )...
Or look at it this way: It is quite funny that people were surprised and impressed when they saw visual studio.NET for the first time , because it was RAD tool and everything was much easier to build , but on the other hand they had Delphi and Borland C++ Builder for a long time before, with everything that it had to offer ( and it was much more than C# had)...
Let's make this irony even bigger and say that the man behind C# and entire .NET was the chief architect for the team which produced Delphi : Anders Hejlsberg.

I thought thing were getting much better when Borland created CodeGear. I thought they would stop selling IDEs and start all over...
Borland C++ Builder 2007 was released in a short time, JBuilder and Blackfish SQL too...And everything else was going just fine... JBuilder even won "the best Java IDE in 2007" title...
And then this...
So, in May Embarcadero technologies bought CodeGear for almost 30 million dollars. No Borland and it's tools anymore??? Sad...

In my personal opinion: YES there ARE better IDEs on the market, but there are no better RAD tools then Borland C++ Builder and Delphi and it's VCL.
I have yet to find another environment that made good looking apps that fast as these two IDEs.

I wish all the luck to Embarcadero, and hope to see only improvement on tools it bought...

* - unfortunatelly

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