Marco Milani

I just read this post in which the author depicted the main differences between works involving static environments, like accountants management, in which the way of making things changes slowly and more dynamic environments, like IT related areas, in which things change terribly faster.

Reading this I realized what I recently thought about the continue and strong knowledge process I need to face to in my everyday work and I put myself a question: would I like to live without continuously learning new things?

In last few month I become aware of one big truth: I'm not happy at night if during the day I didn't learn something new.

I suppose that this is due mainly to two factors:
1. I'm forced to learn new things every day, because technologies and markets move faster and faster and the knowledge must run ,at least at the same speed. Any IT professional is on the cutting edge of the technology and has to remain on the edge in order to offer excellent products.
2. I physically require to learn something new every day. My soul and my brain ask this.

The first is an external conditioning, the second is a condition imposed by my way of being. These two penetrate mutually in such a strong way that I can't decide which of the two is the independent cause: is my soul that makes me "decide" to become an IT professional or is the IT market that addicted me to such an high rate of changes and making me unable to live without continuous improvements?

I suppose, and I like to think that, neither the first nor the second is the unique independent cause, but both com-penetrates in making me like I am.

I also realized that is really difficult to me working on repetitive duties (sometimes this is necessary even in IT activities) without giving up to the seduction of suspend my tasks and start exploring new solutions and paths in order to find optimized and more efficient ways of doing the same things.

This is good because improves my abilities and my background, but it is also a doom because it continuously train my brain and make me addicted to a continuous learning process.

Anyone who knows me very well noticed I have not written any post about Delphi.
Yes, It's a little bit strange even to me, because Delphi is one of my best topic in my technical chats.

I planned to write some structured delphi topics in future, in this topic I would only write a short text about the new Delphi release.

Some days ago, Codegear (now Embarcadero Technologies) announced the new version of Delphi (http://www.codegear.com/products/Delphi/win32). This version represents a deep cut to the past company uncertainty . Since CodeGear spun off delphi rised again its head and appear more mature and more reliable product then tipsily previous two or three versions... let me cite Delphi 8 as the worst treason from Borland.

Even if Delphi 2007 was a very good product, in this 2009 version there are some nice new features like:
* Unicode support
* new DataSnap technology
* generics and anonymous methods
* some new VCL components
* some IDE enhancement

I attended some events in which codegear presented these new features, despite these feature are quite interesting, in MHO this is far from a "cannot miss" release. Unicode is really specific to cross-culture applications,DataSnap and the new VCL components are just extensions of functionality already covered by 3rd party components and IDE is mainly the same as 2007 with some new enhancements.

Anyway I'm really happy to see this new Delphi 2009, mainly because this is the first version of Delphi published by Embarcadero Technologies, a company really focused on development tools. I'm thinking to Inprise, than Borland, DevCo, CodeGear.... what a confusion! And, mainly, how difficult was to understand the medium term vision!

With this version of Delphi, I can smell the fragrance of the great Delphi age again, like the time in which delphi developers wrote tons of hi quality and freeware components, in which RAD was really RAD and one could write Database driven applications in minutes, in which Delphi was a leader and not a follower in the innovation of development tools.

I love native compiled languages, I have a lot of concerns about intermediate languages like java and .NET, so I'm happy that Delphi will follow the business of the native win 32 compiled language.

I'm also fascinated by Embarcadero. I appreciated very much the new company vision: Development tools+Database tools=CodeGear+DatabaseGear.

I'm sure that happy days are coming for delphi developers.