Is delphi dying?

I'm not intending to be snide or rude, but it's been so many years since I've heard it mentioned that I assumed it was dead.

  > Is it good to start learning delphi now?

That depends.

Do you want to build new software? If yes, look elsewhere.

Do you want to maintain or port old small business software and possibly make large sums of money? Then it might be worth learning Delphi.

Otherwise, Delphi is dead. But I do know of at least one programmer (albeit with excellent personal marketing skills) who learned RPG and became a multi-millionaire taking RPG contracts long after it was considered "obsolete".

It looks like demand for Delphi programmers is down by roughly 2/3 since 2006 (relative to other languages). Source: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=delphi&l=

I know a couple of Delphi developers; good developers. I don't think that they would recommend learning the language today because the number of legacy systems still in Delphi are declining, few new projects use Delphi, and while there are web frameworks, app development frameworks, etc., they really only exist to help existing developers and are not remarkable enough to be worth learning the language.

I think it is objectively hard to measure this sorta stuff, but considering there are 2,139 jobs listed using an aggregating job search engine for delphi. Compare to most of the other language and you find many many many more jobs. so by that measure, yes. By another measure, maybe not.

Dead or not, it's still a good choice if you want to deliver native windows gui apps.

I suggest Lazarus to you. It is a successor of Delphi in a sense. It is rather active.

http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org

Still very much active.