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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

#81

Post by endorphone »

binaryapparatus wrote: post #9

I am bit older than average so I used Delphi in its golden days. Even today few of the old customers need old apps maintained so I keep Delphi 7 ready. It _is_ great IDE/language.

Delphi is quite good, but I really truly think it killed a lot of careers: Many of the people that I worked with on a Delphi project late 90s/early 2000s just never let it go, and their job prospects collapsed to the last few residual shops still using Delphi. I suppose this happens with all technologies (e.g. some people clutch on and make Cobol their lifetime effort, etc), but every time I see a Delphi advocacy piece it makes me a little sad remembering the countless emails looking for possible Delphi engagements.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#83

Post by libx »

nnq wrote: post #32

Was wondering... is there any modern all-in-one RAD-tool nowadays? And if not... why? Has there ever stopped being a need for this?

Try Red (www.red-lang.org)! It's not version 1.0 yet, GUI for OSX and Python is coming, for Windows and Android has already arrived. Small, light, great.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#84

Post by nottorp »

I can't help but notice that all the article talks about is Delphi versions up to 6... which is where it started to go downhill.

Are recent versions of Delphi actually usable? I haven't tried anything beyond 8, and from my (admittedly rusty) experience the best version was 6.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#85

Post by tluyben2 »

muyuu wrote: post #57
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…

>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/

Did you try it? I try it every year (I was a Delphi fan and full time Delphi programmer from Delph-1 to 6) but it is not very good. The Pascal compiler is brilliant and fast but Lazarus itself is unusable every time I try. It often begins by failing to build the basic form until I go through a bunch of steps to fix the install. That's going to put most people off as Delphi never had that issue; it was install-and-go. And after that it depends a bit on the position of the moon what happens. For instance, I just installed it again because of your post and when I press Run, I get http://imgur.com/a/blFNC . But even when you have it running, it keeps being highly unstable. Maybe it's just me but I doubt it.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#86

Post by ivm »

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?

> Delphi is still unrivaled when it comes to rapid GUI prototyping in combination with easy deployment.

Try Unity3d component-based uGUI that you can edit live during the "playmode". After building complex UIs in it, going back to Xcode Interface Builder is like moving from iOS to a smartphone from 2005.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#87

Post by pjmlp »

Delphi was a great environment, but Anders and other key persons leaving Borland, while the company lost track which customers they should target, besides the "clever" idea to change the company's name, killed it.

I know of a few companies in Germany and Netherlands that still use it, but it is hard to get offers.

And we had to wait 15 years until .NET started to offer a compilation model similar to Delphi (only for UWP apps).

While Java kind of outsourced it to third party JDK vendors due to Sun's attitude against AOT compilation, oh well at least Java 9 will bring the first steps towards support it.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#88

Post by yoodenvranx »

ptero wrote: post #76
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?

IMO Pascal is a good, clean language and Borland was a top engineering shop that built Delphi as a rapid development tool that supported Windows . At the time there was nothing comparable for Windows development. There was a huge marked for Windows consumer applications and games (Linux was not a household name yet) and very little outside of clumsy Visual Studio to write them. I recall reading at WSJ at the time tha…

> Now there are IMO much better cross platform tools for RAD (Python, Tcl/Tk, ...)

That's why I wrote "in combination with easy deployment". Yes, you can do faster RAD in Python but good luck with easy deployment.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#89

Post by noir_lord »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #65
noir_lord wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that really says anything about Delphi and everything about the massive complexity of large software. I get regular crashes with a bunch of stuff (everything from Thunar (don't think that shows C has aged badly), Chrome (C++) and Intellij (Java).

Some languages make it harder than others, there is a whole class of bugs that just disappear when you have garbage collection for instance.

I agree but a large program in one of those languages will still have more bugs than a small one, that's just the nature of things and the increase in bugs isn't linear either in my experience.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#90

Post by vram22 »

Somewhat long and interesting thread about Delphi from a while ago, on HN:

Delphi – why won't it die? (2013) (stevepeacocke.blogspot.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613543

Did a search in hn.algolia.com just now to find the thread, and it was the top result when the setting was "By popularity":

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=delphi&sort=byPopularity&prefi...

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