I love Delphi, have done for years. It's a very nice language. It also taught me a thing or two about coding properly (If I was to be perfectly honest), the lessons I learned from Delphi have been put to good use in my VB.net work in the office and I've been able to help other less fortunate coders in their work too.

I agree that if Delphi Dies, it will be Borland's fault. Their standards have slipped immensely and they havn't innovated enough so they find themselves in a trench dug by Microsoft.

Delphi5 was a brilliant piece of work. I wrote some cool stuff with that and DelphiX. Had a great time doing it too. The IDE was pretty close to perfect for the job at hand. When the JEDI-SDL headers came out I was in heaven.

I got all excited when Kylix came out, SDL had given me a taste of Cross platform developement so I went to the Linux Expo, chatted to the Borland guys and came out with the feeling that Borland were on my side and I could write some serious apps for Linux. I purchased it, installed it and was seriously dissapointed. It was basically a Wine Hack and now it doesn't even run on a newer Kernel. Shoddy. It was only Kylix 1, but from what I've heard, Kylix3 isn't much better.

Yesterday, I downloaded Free Pascal and Lazarus. It worked first time on Linux and after some minor code changes I got my Kylix game to compile. Kylix won't even run. I'm now looking forward to continuing the development of my game and releasing something soon...(ish)

But there is a nagging doubt in the back of my mind. I originally thought that .net was a fad, a novelty which would quickly dissapear.. that was 4 years ago.. Now I'm not so sure. The languages we use are generally the languages which will help us to get a decent programming job in the real world. So for games, it's C++, for Business it's VB.net, C# or Java

I don't see a place in the new business world for Delphi as an executable compiler and I think Borland see this too. Which is why they've gone to support the dark side. I hope I'm wrong on this point.

Pascal is a very good academic language. It's very clean and it doesn't let you get away with silly mistakes which would normally be allowed and would wreck a C++ program. The code structure is very tidy and easy to follow.
So its very good for learning how to code and code properly.
It certainly helped me.

I believe that as long as universities still support Pascal, it will never die completely but even though it has a strong following, programmers are easily persuaded when faced with future prospects and wads of cash.

Somewhere in this disjointed and long post is my opinion. That's all it is though, please feel free to disagree with it.