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Project: Linux  Opinions
Borland comes back to life
By Prakash Advani <prakash@NOSPAMfreeos.com>
Posted: ( 2000-11-07 12:11:07 EST by )
History's going to repeat itself, with Borland releasing for Linux their
flagship product, Delphi. Claimed to be the fastest compiler available, it
will surely speed up deployment of applications under Linux.
Today, I'm going to tell you a story. It's about a company called Borland,
now known as Inprise. But I prefer to call it Borland, since the name
brings back old memories. In the 1970s, Philippe Kahn was working on the Pascal language in
Switzerland. In 1982, he came to the USA. In those days, Pascal compilers
were very expensive and cost a few thousand dollars. They were available
only for mainframes. That made Philippe Kahn think back and write a Pascal
compiler for PCs. He liked Pascal and wanted the compiler to be
affordable. In those days of yore, BYTE magazine was one of the most popular computer
magazines. So, he approached BYTE and told them he wanted to put an
advertisement in the magazine, but he didn't have the money to pay for it.
The magazine, obviously, found that a silly thing to say. But, before they
decided to throw him out of the office, they asked him what the ad was
about. He told them he wanted to put in an ad for a Pascal compiler for
only $49.95. He finally convinced an advertising salesperson to accept on
credit a full-page color ad for Turbo Pascal. Philippe was stormed with orders, and this is how Borland was born. How it
got the name is an interesting story too, but I'll keep that for another
column. After Turbo Pascal, they came up with Turbo C, Borland C++, Delphi,
InterBase and several other development tools that have changed the face
of computer programming. Anyone who's been a programmer for a while must have definitely admired
Borland. Several programmers in the past decade used, "We swear by
Borland!" Borland then expanded to develop applications like Sidekick,
QuattroPro and Paradox - all of which became very popular applications.
Borland grew to become one of the biggest companies making development
tools. Today, Borland is struggling to survive in the market and its recent
merger with Corel has fallen through. By now, you must be thinking, "That's a good story! I may have heard it
several times before, but what's it doing in a Linux column?" The reason is that Borland is coming back to life with its
development tools being released for Linux. History's going to repeat itself, with Borland releasing for Linux their
flagship product, Delphi - called the The Kylix Project.
Borland is well respected in the developer community and Delphi is
claimed to be the fastest compiler available. Also on the cards are plans
to port C+ + Builder to Linux. There's a tremendous demand for Linux applications and Linux programmers.
Currently, there are two problems for application developers under Linux.
Most Windows developers have difficulty in moving to a new platform like
Linux. The reason is that they would have to do a great deal of re-coding to port
their existing applications to Linux. Another problem is that the tools they're familiar
with are not available for Linux. When Borland releases these tools in the market, it will surely speed up
deployment of applications under Linux. Programmers will have a good rapid
application development (RAD) environment to choose from and it will give them more
choices. It will also enable porting of existing Delphi and C++ Builder
applications from Windows to Linux. With so much of existing Windows applications developed in Borland
products, there's a huge potential for code re-use and these applications
can be ported onto the Linux platform in no time. There are also thousands of programmers around the world using Borland
development tools now - or have used them in the past. Since these
developers are already familiar with the tools, they could easily write
applications for the Linux platform. If Borland can manage to speed up
application development on the Linux platform, I'm sure, as Linux grows,
Borland, too, will get a share of the pie. Long live Borland!
Other articles by Prakash Advani
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