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22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

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Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#141

Post by willtim »

bartread wrote: post #116
wtbob wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A weak point, though, is JavaScript — quite possibly the worst popular computer language in history. I honestly think I'd rather starve than write another line of JavaScript again. Even reading JavaScript diffs from other guys on my team is a horrible, terrible experience. It's just a sad, awful, miserable, verbose, broken language. As a compilation target from a better language, I suppose it's mostly acceptable. But…

"Worst popular computer language in history." That's a bit strong, isn't it? It certainly has its faults, but so did VB6 (and other BASIC variants, for that matter). PHP gets widely slagged off as well. Does it deserve it? Possibly, to some extent, but people still manage to successfully build useful software with it. With JavaScript, the problem isn't so much the language (though there are many ways to use and misus…

I disagree. Languages like Haskell are much less tolerant of terrible code, which is a large part of the reason why beginners struggle with it.

I work with other peoples Haskell code daily; and some of this code has been written by domain experts. Nevertheless, Haskell mostly forces them into line. Our competitors use Python because it is superficially "easy", I can only imagine what horrors they must be dealing with.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#142

Post by marcosdumay »

alex_duf wrote: post #91

I remember using Delphi 2 when I was younger, that's how I learned programming. If you don't mind hearing my personal story, keep reading, otherwise move on to another comment. By an interesting coincidence I was given a CD with tons of software on it, including Delphi 2. I started playing with it and quickly realised I could create my own programs using that tool. Later I went to the book store and found a book abou…

> so I learned as much English as I could so I could understand that manual.

:)

I started learning English as a kid to understand what was happening on the MS BASIC programs I could get on my computer by the time.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#143

Post by eli_gottlieb »

I got my start programming with Delphi 5. It was an excellent environment to learn in, since I could always see something happening based on what I had done.

Better: the Delphi component libraries made writing a GUI application easy. I've never seen anything of their quality and ease up through today, and I still miss being able to get an application running by just subclassing some standard components and writing the core logic I needed.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#144

Post by svenfaw »

pmarreck wrote: post #129
alex_duf wrote: post #91

I remember using Delphi 2 when I was younger, that's how I learned programming. If you don't mind hearing my personal story, keep reading, otherwise move on to another comment. By an interesting coincidence I was given a CD with tons of software on it, including Delphi 2. I started playing with it and quickly realised I could create my own programs using that tool. Later I went to the book store and found a book abou…

Nice! For me it was Microsoft BASIC on the early Macintosh and this magical book from 1985: https://smile.amazon.com/Macintosh-Midnight-Madness-Utilitie... (Wow, I can't find the actual cover art anywhere! It was much cooler than what's shown there.)

http://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/161789449967-0-1/s-l1000.jpg

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#145

Post by bakhy »

marvin wrote: post #72
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?

Windows Forms is still a completely decent option that gives you the same advantages.

i fully agree! though technically, there is a pretty big dependency there - the .NET Framework...

however, Mono supports WinForms on all platforms, and is able to compile everything into one standalone EXE. to be honest, i have not tried either, so i cannot say much about how that works in practice. from my experience with Mono, it can be dangerous. every now and then a new version breaks threading, causing mysterious pauses or crashes, and i've read (i think a text by Ayende) that the GC can also be buggy. but for the stuff that Delphi was good at, for smaller RAD apps, it might be worth a try.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#146

Post by astine »

zubspace wrote: post #109
marvin wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows Forms is still a completely decent option that gives you the same advantages.

I fully agree. I sometimes wonder, why so many people jump to fancy frameworks like WPF where you need to create the markup yourself. I can spit out interfaces for desktop apps in no time with good old winforms but struggle to write data-bindings, triggers and what not in other frameworks. And it even looks consistent and the tools are generally easy to adjust and extend.

You don't need to write the markup yourself with WPF. You can drag components into the designer just the same as with winforms assuming you are using Visual Studio, and everything will look pretty standard unless you go out of your way to change it.

As to the databinding, I find that WPF has more upfront work in databinding, in that you actually have to write some code, but that it's a lot more flexible in the long run. When I used to write winforms, I usually ended up with a lot of business logic embedded in hooks. It was a mess and was hard to reason about.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#147

Post by marcosdumay »

vintagedave wrote: post #101
ptero wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> no Linux targets? Linux is coming in the next release - there will be a blog on that soon. It already has Mac, iOS, and Android on top of its Windows support. Honestly, I do not believe that Python or Tcl/Tk count as "good" RAD cross-platform tools. Only if you've never used something like modern Delphi to compare them to. We regularly have customers give feedback about their productivity with Delphi/C++Builder, ve…

> Only if you've never used something like modern Delphi to compare them to.

The last time I used Delphi it was on version 5. I never used anything for desktop GUIs on Python or Tcl/Tk (or any other language) that comes even close to it. That requirement of "modern" is too outreaching.

But I'm impressed by Python's kivy (but still didn't really use it), and there are some interesting things happening on Haskell circles. I'm optimist in that Delphi's decades old title may fall soon.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#148

Post by coldtea »

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, ...) and Delphi is showing its age

Tk is the better than Delphi RAD tool?

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#149

Post by pjmlp »

ealexhudson wrote: post #105
ptero wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They produced Kylix not that long ago - I had an original box set once upon a time. I have no idea why that didn't take off, but it was an excellent environment really.

> I have no idea why that didn't take off, but it was an excellent environment really.

- It was a wrapper around Qt

- Had some dependencies on Wine

- The set of available controls was small

- It was closed source

- They expected GNU/Linux developers to be willing to pay for it

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#150

Post by saganus »

gressquel wrote: post #26
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?

I remember when we developed "remote administration tools" (trojans) we used Delphi but we made it as console application. The executables ended up on 15 kb for a full-featured RAT.

Ahhh... the memories.

In the 90s I met this guy in IRC that used Delphi 2 to program a RAT called Hacker's Paradise.

He was very kind with me (I was much younger than him apparently) and shared the source code so I could learn from it since I was constantly asking him programming stuff.

Then later he renamed the tool "Master's Paradise" so he could go legit and sell it to companies and compete with MS BackOffice.

I enjoyed talking with him so much, even though I could barely understand OOP, but the thought of talking to a real developet left me an impression

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