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22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

blog.marcocantu.com

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Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#41

Post by yoodenvranx »

StevePerkins wrote: post #37
interfixus wrote: post #22

A shocking aspect of Delphi 1 was the gargantuan executables it insisted on producing. There was much forum posting and gnashing of teeth. Hello World ran to about 100 kB. Funny thing is, I am just getting into Go, and you know what?

There's just no way to develop a GUI application (especially a cross-platform one) without shipping something large. You can use Electron (and basically bundle Chrome), or JavaFX (and bundle a Java runtime), and they're about the same size. But even if you ship all of the Qt dynamic libs, or all of the GTK dependencies, or even wxWidgets... it's still a far cry from "light". It just takes tens of megs to make a windo…

> There's just no way to develop a GUI application (especially a cross-platform one) without shipping something large

If you compiled a Delphi program without using the UI stuff the resulting .exe files were usually only a few dozen kb in size. People used this fact in combination with using raw Win32 API in order to create very small sized UI apps with no external dependencies.

There were tons of tutorials on how to use Win32 API in combination with Delphi.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#42

Post by camus2 »

interfixus wrote: post #22

A shocking aspect of Delphi 1 was the gargantuan executables it insisted on producing. There was much forum posting and gnashing of teeth. Hello World ran to about 100 kB. Funny thing is, I am just getting into Go, and you know what?

> Funny thing is, I am just getting into Go, and you know what?

    package main

    func main(){print("Hello");}
is 951kB on my computer.

But you need to remember that Go bundles a whole runtime with your executable, something C doesn't do.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#43

Post by yoodenvranx »

Delphi is still unrivaled when it comes to rapid GUI prototyping in combination with easy deployment. It's much easier than QT/GTK and you usually get a standalone .exe with no external dependencies.

I really want to cry when I see the current alternatives... Node/Electron with dozens of MB of runtime and all that Javascript stuff? What went wrong that we end up with this?

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#44

Post by nunobrito »

ahacker15 wrote: post #23

Delphi is still popular in the south of Brazil. It's dying, but slowly. There's a lot a legacy application written in Delphi here. Some old programmers, that only know to program in Delphi, may even build new apps with it. It may not be that modern today, but there's the "pay the bills" mindset. I think Delphi will die, but only because it costs a fortune today. If it had a resonable price, many people would continue…

You're right. The IDE has grown outdated, we just need the old Delphi (no .NET stuff) with an updated IDE.

Funny enough, I can produce Delphi executables that run perfectly on Linux and Mac using Wine. That means executables that run on anything from Windows 95 to any modern desktop operating systems available today.

Why the heck did they decided to kill such a good platform.

I've moved to Java back in 2010. From my perspective was the best next thing (platform agnostic, rock-solid) but still miss my Delphi IDE to create good looking UI apps with ease.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#45

Post by masterponomo »

I attended a Clipper user group in Atlanta in the mid 1990's, with my dad. He was into Clipper, was trying to get me interested. The Clipper folks were also into Turbo Pascal. A Borland rep was there to give out swag and talk up the imminent release of Borland Delphi. The Clipper crowd was divided--some excited, some not so much. The older guys, like my dad, had come up programming with punched cards and tape drives. For them, a PC with Clipper and Turbo Pascal was plenty advanced enough for small business apps. Dad never did go for Delphi. 20+ years later, I'm doing a quick study of Object Pascal to prep for working on a legacy application at my work, in Delphi.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#46

Post by adam-falafel »

My first job out of college was as a tech support intern for Delphi, first answering pre-sales and installation calls, and eventually moving up to answering paid support calls. From there, I joined a consulting company and wrote and maintained LOB applications written in Delphi. Good times. Jumped ship to .NET in 2003.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#47

Post by nunobrito »

pboschmann wrote: post #29
fredsted wrote: post #6

Sometimes I kind of miss Delphi 7. The way it makes it easy to create apps made programming so fun. Such a shame it went downhill after the .NET stuff.

Oh yes, I absolutely loved the tinkering with Delphi and Kylix before I was a professional programmer. I remember Borland distributed Delphi6 for free for personal use and I had a lot of fun with it. In the end I landed a job as a web developer, worked in PSPad and left Delphi forgotten until the day — a decade or so later after I used Delphi the last time — I opened Eclipse the first time in my life. Never hated a t…

Yep. I don't use Eclipse for these same reasons. It really seems someone hates IDE and we arrived on hell for paying back something we did in a past life.

I switched to Netbeans. Slightly better: bigger icons, better looking UI. I like the key combinations there. Still nowhere good compared to Delphi IDE with useful code snippets built-in and easy-to-use creation of UI apps.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#48

Post by riledhel »

yoodenvranx wrote: post #43

Delphi is still unrivaled when it comes to rapid GUI prototyping in combination with easy deployment. It's much easier than QT/GTK and you usually get a standalone .exe with no external dependencies. I really want to cry when I see the current alternatives... Node/Electron with dozens of MB of runtime and all that Javascript stuff? What went wrong that we end up with this?

And compile times were pretty fast too

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#49

Post by Elrac »

silveira wrote: post #24

The documentation and help pages that came with Delphi were absolutely the best documentation I ever had. Every topic came with examples that you could copy and reuse. Not just snippets but fully functional blocks of code. It was brilliant.

You've reminded me of the reason I loved Delphi's help. I think what I found most helpful (and most unusual for the "state of the art") was that most help pages had "see also" links. This allowed me to look up something similar to what I needed and just follow the links to what I really wanted.

I was able to use the Help pages as (almost?) my sole reference for the API. Something that just wasn't happening with Delphi's big competitor, VB.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#50

Post by barking »

Back then there was no internet and I knew no programmers. I remember seeing the yellow borland boxes at PC World and not really understanding what borland were. Afterwards I bought my first copy of vb secondhand (lots of manuals came with it), from someone who was getting into Delphi instead.
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