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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

#191

Post by pimeys »

bartread wrote: post #178
willtim wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Part of this is that with Haskell it's much more like there's one right way to do things, and that's it. JavaScript is a multi-paradigm language and so in that way it's always possible to get into more of a mess. I could say the same about, for example, C++. 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 assi…

Funny, because I would hire a person straight from university as a junior developer, if she chose to write all the assignments with Haskell instead of going with C/C++/Java/whateverpopularlanguage. That would be a really good sign.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#192

Post by igivanov »

Hey Marco, I still have your Delphi 5 book :-)

FWIIW, where I work, I started using Delphi 5 when it came out. As of now we have about a dozen D5 desktop applications all essential for the core business that are in active use and supported as necessary, running happily on Windows 10. I don't see why it won't continue like this for another 15 years... The bosses (who are non-programmers) don't really care that D5 is out of fashion - because it all just works (and rocks).

The only reason I couldn't upgrade to a later version (Unicode is one thing that would be useful) is I am stuck with one critical and long discontinued grid component.

Looking back I am not sure how we could have lived w/o Delphi. Well maybe it's an exaggeration, but certainly life would have been more difficult. Everything else from before .NET/C#/Windows Forms looks like a nightmare.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#193

Post by criddell »

StevePerkins wrote: post #37
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?

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…

Cross platform applications are going to be large, but if you aren't cross platform, you can create pretty small applications.

Steve Gibson at grc.com has GUI utilities that are pretty small. For example, his DNS benchmarking tool is 165 kB.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#194

Post by hsitz »

Havoc wrote: post #71

It's good for teaching purposes because it forces a very structured clear line of thinking. Not convinced it's still best as a practical language though.

I don't think many ever thought the language itself was ever "the best". It was the way the libraries and visual components (together, the "VCL") were designed, and the way things worked within the IDE, that many thought made Delphi the best. The Delphi/ObjectPascal language on its own, however, was pretty good.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#195

Post by hsitz »

nottorp wrote: post #84

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.

Back in early 2000's when I used it a lot, the word was that the even numbered versions of Delphi (2, 4, 6) were all poor efforts, and the odd numbered (3,5,7) were all good. I used 6 and didn't think it was bad, but 7 was better. Many Delphi users had remained at version 5.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#196

Post by Figs »

romanovcode wrote: post #58
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?

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

More like ~100MB. At least it was the last time I tried it about 6 months ago. Might have gotten better since then.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#197

Post by pjmlp »

bartread wrote: post #171
pjmlp wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would .NET with Visual Studio and Blend fit that purpose quite nicely as well.

I might be a few years out of date now (no WPF since 2011) but all I remember of Blend is it was so complex to learn and use that it was easier just to hand-code my XAML. Not at all like the GUI builders of yore. That may have changed though.

It is a different mindset, not just dragging boxes around and setting properties.

The idea of Bled is to mix those RAD concepts with Photoshop like tooling for designers.

I still find it easier than trying to make web pages look like the Photoshop mockups.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#198

Post by Figs »

StevePerkins wrote: post #37
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?

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 doesn't have to be so big. Modern GUI toolkits are just really bad about keeping their sizes down for some reason.

I wrote my own personal GUI toolkit on top of OpenGL/GLFW for developing special purpose editors (for gamedev), and the resulting executables plus required shared libraries and resources (minus system libraries like libGL that shouldn't be distributed directly with the application) are only about a megabyte or two total. That includes a full blown custom scripting language interpreter, resizable rich text widget with bold/italics/color support + optional text wrapping and scrollbars, JSON parser and serializer, vector math library, a basic image loader and saver for several formats (using stb plus a little custom code for a few less common formats), various routines for software manipulation of surfaces (e.g. drawing lines, triangles, alpha blending images, and so on)... written in C++, with debugging info turned on, and using templates where appropriate. (It'd be even smaller if I stripped debug info and packed the whole thing into one executable.) I'm developing it on Linux, but I could rebuild it for Windows (and probably Mac) without too much effort.

I don't know what the hell the GUI libraries are doing to get so big.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#199

Post by pjmlp »

coldtea wrote: post #154
pjmlp wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> something C doesn't do. Sure it does, not all C compilers are like gcc with the idiosyncratics of glibc.

No, only the ones that matter.

The ones that matter to me are perfectly capable of handling a -static flag and use other C runtimes.
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