Foreword

One of the great things about my job is that I get to interact with a wide variety of superbly creative developers across the world. That creativity produces all sorts of things from clever and innovative libraries and components, to videos, user group activities, and, perhaps my favorite — books. For over thirty years people have been using Pascal, Object Pascal, and Delphi to drive everything you can possibly imagine such as factories, the ticketing infrastructure of world famous theme parks, nuclear power station control desks, space hardware ground control, airport announcements, automated milking of prize cattle, coast guard emergency communication and location software, and everything in between. Over 4 million workers in the United Kingdom use biometric hardware to clock in and out for work and grant, or deny, them access to buildings. Almost any place or situation you can dream up there is probably a program lurking which is written in Pascal, probably Delphi.

It is a fact to say YOU, personally, have probably interacted today with a program written in Object Pascal of some form or other. And all this happens solidly, drama-free, with absolutely legendary reliability. A lot of the code that does this never sees the light of day and it’s not uncommon to find a Delphi program which has not changed despite being originally written for Windows XP, and having passed through multiple iterations of Microsoft’s operating system still runs perfectly comfortably today on the very latest versions of Windows. Almost no other programming language can make that claim, not even C, the grand progenitor of high-level languages.

That great party trick of Delphi being “silently successful” is both a blessing, and a curse. If you don’t make a fuss, you will not stand out from the crowd. Yes, the heydays of Borland are a halcyon dream, but people have been prematurely announcing the demise of Pascal for at least 25 years and trying to bolster that by claiming the language is “old”. Yet, weirdly both Python and JavaScript are older. So is C++. If you read through this book you’ll also very quickly see that modern Object Pascal is adept, agile, current — without trashing all the things that made it so awesome when it first emerged from the mind of Niklaus Wirth and evolved under the auspices of Borland. Embarcadero, my employer, takes that ancestry very seriously. I regularly work with a handful of colleagues who were employed at Borland and, in fact, one even predates the Borland days. The rest are a solid representation of all age ranges and nationalities and yet, despite that broad diversity we are very much a team, all pulling in the same direction, perhaps more so than any other place I have worked in my 40+ year development career.

We are passionate about Delphi, and Object Pascal (yes, and we embrace Free Pascal, we are two sides of the same coin). Anyone who has met Marco Cantú, myself, or other colleagues in person will be happy to endorse that — it’s a very cool thing and quite rare.

That same passion for Object Pascal, for the begin and the end of it, for the mechanics of software engineering using it, the hardcore experience of wielding it to create real software used by real people, coupled with an in-depth understanding of the language is what you are holding (or reading) right now: this book. David has written, as he says in the introduction, the missing “long middle” of books about Delphi and Object Pascal. In this time of an effusion of soulless AI-produced books, leaflets, videos, and blog posts it is absolutely refreshing to find The Delphi Way is entirely the product of human effort. And what an effort! In printed form this book is inches thick. Even in digital form it’s a beast, an opus magnum. The work covers a huge amount of topics including basic information on how to get started, through more computer science style topics such as design patterns, to the pros and cons of various third party libraries. This book is extraordinary. David mentions on his website he worked on writing The Delphi Way for three years. It absolutely shows, and instead of ‘cheating’ by including long source code listings in the body of the book’s text to pad it out he has a companion site where you can download the projects, ready to go. Nicely done. It is a thick healthy wad of pure coding knowledge deliciousness.

Do I agree with everything in the book? No, and that’s not because there’s anything wrong in here — it’s because, as any professional developer will tell you, there are often different opinions on how to approach a problem. Software development is still part science — with a lot of art and creativity mixed in. This is despite the huge tsunami of AI which is sweeping through our industry.

Good luck with getting through the book, especially if you’re currently holding a physical printed copy which your smartphone probably counts as an exercise workout; but stick at it because this one is special and worth every penny.

Ian Barker.
Developer Advocate,
Embarcadero Technologies.