171–180 of 344 posts
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?
I would .NET with Visual Studio and Blend fit that purpose quite nicely as well.
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I'd also think "It's $1400 cheaper than Delphi" would be a good selling point. I started using Turbo Pascal in college when it was $49. Given that Embarcadero Delphi is competing with a lot of stuff that is free and high-quality, I doubt it's got anywhere to go but down from here.
I payed around 100 € (direct conversion) for Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5, back in the day. One reason Borland lost us was when they decided to go after the enterprise market, with comparable prices.
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…
It rocks to the point of server unavailability.
Sorry about that, my blog is self-hosted and never gets much traffic -- roughly 100x general volume
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You haven't heard about Red ( http://www.red-lang.org ), have you? With some Kb you can ship GUI executables for Windows, Android, OSX and Linux. (OSX and Linux soon). Try it and report back the amount of Kb (not Mb) used.
It doesn't make GUI's for OSX just yet, and I'll be interested to see if it stays that small once OSX and Linux support are added. EDIT: The version on their download page doesn't make GUI's for OSX yet, but there seem to be other versions that do.
> I'll start blogging on the Delphi language coming back to Linux tomorrow! To taste the cross-platform IDE for Rapid Application Development today: http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ http://www.lazarus-ide.org/index.php?page=whyuse "Why use Lazarus? No dependencies! With Lazarus you can create programs which do not require any platform dependencies [1]. The result of it is the user of your program does not need to install…
I was a Delphi addict in the 90's. After Borland screwed up Delphi - including the Kylix disaster - and since I am now a full time Linux user - Lazarus is the only option.
I have been following the Lazarus / Free Pascal project for years, and I think now is a good time to pick it up.
I wish that it had more traction, though.
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).
On the other hand, the tool should help prevent these issues. Altium has visible exceptions and lots of memory leaks that are much easier to prevent or solve with modern development tools and languages.
Also, C aged badly, but the tools (ecosystem seems to be the hip name nowadays) for C evolved, and in a smaller scale, even the language itself has evolved. Object Pascal and Delphi doesn't seem to be catch up so well.
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"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…
Maybe beginners do struggle with Haskell but, if you want my two cents, the reason nobody really bothered with it back when I was at university - except for assignments where we had to use it - was because there was no call for it out in the world (this is going back 17 years). Most people built their projects in C, C++, or Java because those were what you needed to get a job. I'd also observe that the same people that struggled with Haskell also struggled with C, C++, and Java [1].
Again, based on the assignments where people did write Haskell I'd have to suggest that it absolutely is (or was) possible to write terrible code in Haskell. Certainly it's possible to write broken, fragile, or barely functional code that's hard to understand.
[1] This is of course anecdotal evidence based on a small sample size - maybe 40 people on the course.
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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…
There's a continuum of restriction of style. The Python guys say the same thing about Perl. "We can handle our diversity, but the Perl guys are completely out of control so I don't know how anyone can handle that." Imagine being a clothing designer and told to make something. The output could be anything from Beyonce's grammy dress to a famous deceased CEO who wore black turtlenecks all the time. That extreme diversi…
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?
Shifting of priorities.
I remember when people used to complain that Delphi executables were 'bloated' and large - 200KB was the minimum size?
At that time the complaints didn't seem absurd when we were connecting via 36k dialups.
Admittedly we have probably swung too much in the other direction.