There has been an interesting debate between Allen Bauer and Luigi Sandon in response to my post on Handbook Note 34 on new Language Features. The first comment by Allen clarifies my post (whcih being a book note, was not very articulated). But I understand and second Luigi's desire for more language features. That's somethign oly CodeGear can do, while for nice components we can also look to third parties and free libraries.
In my post, I didn't mean that new language features are useless: I do like them a lot. Those mentioned in the post (strict private, class var) are certainly very nice to have. But think, for example, of operators overloading. For years there were cries because Delphi didn't have them, and now very few people are using them because, well, they are not terribly useful after all. The priority is not to match features in other languages per se. It is to introduce valuable features that are sound for Object Pascal.
As an opposite example, a great feature like class helpers, that's been introduced in Delphi *before* several other popular languages (and not following them) is mostly unnoticed when doing language comparisons. I saw few people praising class helpers... while the matching feature of Ruby is highly esteemed.
I'm looking into Ruby a little bit and finding out more and more that Delphi as a language does have extra value compared to some of those "curly brace" languages that are so popular. Another element it its dynamic nature due to the presence of variants, I'm using those in one of the demos for my CodeRage II DSL (Domain Specific Language) talk! More about this after the conference...
The real problems no one is addressing is how to teach Delphi developers to leverage their language... sounds like an interesting book project after all.