Borland Turbo C/C++ and Turbo Pascal ruled the MS-DOS programming world during the 80s and early 90s. These were the compilers/IDEs that made it a joy to develop software and they occupy a special place in the hearts of many “older” programmers. It was therefore with great joy that I read about the Turbo series comeback Borland announced a couple of days ago.

The Turbo series will contain Delphi, C++, Delphi .NET and C# packages. If you’re using only one of these, you can use the Explorer version which is free. There is however a serious limitation, “Extensible and customizable IDE for hundreds of available pre-built IDE 3rd party plug-ins and components” is not available in the Explorer edition. This makes this free edition practically unusable for any serious development. And this is where Borland is making the same mistake as they did several times before. Expensive tools will never attract large amounts of followers, specially in today’s world of powerful opensource tools. I don’t see how Borland didn’t learn from the JBuilder vs Eclipse fiasco.

I myself will probably continue using the (once) Free Delphi 6 Personal Edition which is a nicely stripped down version that fulfil all my Delphi programming needs and I’ll continue to eagerly wait for the day when I’ll be able to port my apps to Lazarus.

Tags: Delphi, Turbo Delphi, Turbo Pascal, Borland, Lazarus, Turbo C++, Turbo C#