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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

#161

Post by SyneRyder »

sigzero wrote: post #126
SyneRyder wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shouldn't ever take that much. This is an example of what a 64kB executable could accomplish in 2016: Darkness Lay Your Eyes Upon Me - Conspiracy - Revision 2016 64k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SEGm2lUSY0 http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=67106 After watching a few 64k demoscene demos, a 380MB Electron-based minimalist text editor just seems horribly bloated. (I'm currently writing a cross-platform Windows/…

How do you like Xojo? I've toyed with the idea of giving it a whirl.

I like it a lot, I find it really fast to prototype ideas & get something working. I mostly use it for in-house utility tools (business dashboards, small database stuff) where I wanted the business to be platform agnostic but still native. There's an ecosystem of plugins to extend the built-in Xojo controls (like Delphi has), mostly from MonkeyBread Software and Einhugur Software. It reminds me of the early pre-corporate Delphi days.

I love that Xojo's IDE is cross-platform too, and that I can make my Windows & Linux builds from the Mac IDE. It's been easier for me than Qt anyway, and without any of the licensing or renewal issues.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#162

Post by digler999 »

noir_lord wrote: post #18
aylons wrote: post #15

One of the first environments I ever programmed was Delphi. Had lots of fun with it, and it had a special place in my heart... Fast forward 20 years, and I'm a hardware developer using Altium a lot. As some here may be aware, Altium is a multi-gigabit piece of CAD/EDA behemoth written - and still maintained - in Delphi. 3D, DirectX, everything in Delphi. Just yesterday and today I had easily reproducible BSODs by usi…

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).

The thunar-crashing thing was introduced. A few years back it was stable, then sometime around a year or 2 ago it broke. Sad to see a good piece of software take a step back (proper testing should have prohibited that, shouldn't it ?).

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#163

Post by emcrazyone »

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…

They had a Linux port at one time. It was called Kylix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Kylix

Developing on Linux desktop at that time probably wasn't ready for this.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#164

Post by reitanqild »

I guess I should have started on a greenfield project.

For me it was less rosy.

I remember my boss trying to get me started on Delphi.

We basically had two or three Delphi developer workstations available because setting up one that could compile the projects we had in our vcs was a three day task - and it was only possible with the help of our resident Delphi consultant.

Stuff like that has made me love Maven and Java.

Same goes for Visual Basic that I once used to love.

Still I feel I could have loved it if I didn't start with 10 years of accumulated references to unsupported packages. :-/

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#165

Post by VLM »

bigtunacan wrote: post #123

I never used Delphi, but I have a couple of friends that were die hard Delphi fanatics. Eventually they moved on to C# as all of the Delphi jobs dried up with Delphi's continually decreasing use. They still swore how they thought it was the best thing they ever worked with, but at the end of the day you have to pay the bills. Maybe it really is great, I don't know. I was a bit surprised looking at Tiobe ( http://www.…

I've seen it appear in bottom-up development areas. Top down would be the COBOL(s) of the 21st century that being Java or PHP/Javascript. Very little seems to come from non-software company megacorp enterprise HQ that isn't Java, PHP, or Javascript.

The very bottom tier of bottom up development is making business critical systems depend on Excel and some impenetrable write only undebugable macros. The next tier up is where I've see Delphi apps mostly in sorta integrative and peculiar reporting roles. Oh and ETL of all places too.

At least that's where I've seen it. It works well there, too.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#166

Post by slantyyz »

jsudhams wrote: post #51
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?

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.

I miss them too. VB6 was usually the fastest way to build something that simply did the job.

Now that I'm older and can't mode switch between languages as quickly as I could when I was younger, I find myself just using Node for my personal stuff.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#167

Post by Karunamon »

marcocantu wrote: post #138
codewritinfool wrote: post #130

As a pascal user since the early 80's, then an Object Pascal user, then a Delphi user since the first version, I love Delphi but to be honest I cannot afford the yearly updates. For someone that uses it for home projects, $916 for an upgrade is out of the question. Rambling here, but... Delphi 3/5/7 were incredible design packages. I feel they lost focus when they jumped on the .NET bandwagon - maybe it is just my pe…

For home projects, the Starter edition is free.

Sure, if you don't want to build UWP apps, or 64 bit apps(!), or OSX apps... the list[1] goes on.

[1]: https://www.embarcadero.com/docs/rad-studio-berlin-feature-m...

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#168

Post by Karunamon »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #60
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That market can only possibly be diminishing over time. I mean sure, $bigco can afford ~3k/user/year, but eventually, that's gonna dry up.

Charging for basic development tools in 2017 just seems weird, and I'm afraid by the time they realize that the company is dying, the mindshare will be gone, never to return.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#169

Post by Karunamon »

vintagedave wrote: post #95
bdavisx wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so no one else has to try to find the price (you have to search for it a little). The cheapest new user price for Delphi is USD $1,405.

Or $0, if you use the Starter edition. It's free for hobbyists, students, startups etc, with the clause that if you start making over a certain amount of revenue you're asked to buy it.

..which blocks off a lot of arbitrary features, including iOS, OSX, UWP, and 64 bit compilation of all things.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#170

Post by rgacote »

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…

Yes, the cost is ridiculous. Delphi used to be an affordable tool. I've been a big fan of Delphi and would still be developing Windows apps in Delphi, except for the excessive pricing. Stopped renewing my licenses two years ago.

Delphi had the flexibility of Visual Basic without the deployment problems.

Unlike VB, all the controls and libraries were written in Delphi itself, which allowed you to walk through each and every library when debugging problems.

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