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22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

blog.marcocantu.com

51–60 of 344 posts

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#51

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?

I miss VB6 and VB.net desktop apps as well. still my go to platform for personal apps, so easy to write. Not really sure why for internal company apps people are moving to webapp.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#53

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?

I miss VB6 and VB.net desktop apps as well. still my go to platform for personal apps, so easy to write. Not really sure why for internal company apps people are moving to webapp.

We use web apps at my company because almost all developers know how to make them, not all computers are windows PCs, and you don't need to install anything of download anything for someone to use them.

If you're talking about electron apps, that's a whole other ballgame. We don't build electron apps for internal stuff afaik.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#55

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.

That was pretty much how I learnt programming

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#57

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…

>I think Delphi will die, but only because it costs a fortune today. If it had a resonable price, many people would continue to use it indeterminately.

http://www.lazarus-ide.org/

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#58

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?

Hello World in Electron will probably be around 20mb+.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#59

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?

The strong point of Electron is easy _cross-platform_ application development and packaging (spits out .exe, .app and Linux binary), with no further dependencies. Ever tried packaging a QT application for Mac, Windows and Linux? I can tell you it's a painful experience, one I don't want to repeat.

Also HTML+CSS allows for extremely versatile styling and fine-grained control of appearance.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#60

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…

> I think Delphi will die, but only because it costs a fortune today. I agree with your diagnosis. The problem is that Embarcadero doesn't understand that, and when it does (or when someone else buys Delphi), it may well be much too late to revive it. They could really position various versions of the product in a different way, making the lower tier more affordable.

I think they do understand that, they just see their opportunity elsewhere. The reason is the only price that would satisfy the complainers is free, which isn't going to be very profitable.

There is a community of locked in customers who are wiling to pay to keep their projects going, it makes sense for Embarcadero to milk them.

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