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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

#241

Post by barrkel »

ptero wrote: post #230
coldtea wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is a very simple, script language that allows creating dynamic GUIs on the fly. Very limited ones. And ones clients will have a shock when seeing. And still coding it all together. With Delphi you can drag and drop great looking (and more full featured) prototypes in zero time. It will be limited to Windows, though, I'll give you that.

Clients having a shock after seeing a prototype says a lot about the author and very little about the language the code was written in. Can you clarify "coding it all together" part. I have no idea what you meant.

Delphi GUI building is drag-and-drop - no coding.

Of course for more than trivial built-in behaviours you'll be writing code, but for a UI prototype, especially if it's just CRUD forms etc., you can get it built in a few minutes with no code. Drop a database connection component and set the connection properties, and you'll get live data and properly typed and bound controls on the form too.

Compilation takes fractions of a second, so that's not an impediment to design iteration - but you don't need to compile or run to see what it looks like since it's effectively a WYSIWYG form designer.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#242

Post by wila »

mberger wrote: post #62
yoodenvranx wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's just no way to develop a GUI application (especially a cross-platform one) without shipping something large If you compiled a Delphi program without using the UI stuff the resulting .exe files were usually only a few dozen kb in size. People used this fact in combination with using raw Win32 API in order to create very small sized UI apps with no external dependencies. There were tons of tutorials on how to…

You're right, but the key point (at least for me) is the cross platform. We recently had a client send us their environment setup. Everything ran on AIX except for our stuff. That means they had to specially buy windows server licences just for our product. feelsbadman.

With delphi targeting macOS a GUI app starts at about 18MB. Not tiny, but certainly not too bad.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#244

Post by boondaburrah »

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.

Honestly, it's because the approval required to get an executable onto an employee's computer is absurd. If we can get chrome or firefox on the system image, then all we need to do is point them at a URL. Actually adding software to their computer requires all manner of support tickets and manager approval for them, so they won't do it.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#245

Post by iajrz »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #240
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?

> Node/Electron with dozens of MB of runtime and all that Javascript stuff? What went wrong that we end up with this? I'll tell you. Microsoft and Apple need to protect their native app license revenue, so they hobbled Netscape, brought browser development in house, and made a prohibition on allowing web pages to be integrated tightly into the OS. If those electron apps could get the same OS integration in the browse…

> Microsoft and Apple need to protect their native app license revenue

I don't really understand. I never paid a license to create and distribute native applications.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#246

Post by cwyers »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #240
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?

> Node/Electron with dozens of MB of runtime and all that Javascript stuff? What went wrong that we end up with this? I'll tell you. Microsoft and Apple need to protect their native app license revenue, so they hobbled Netscape, brought browser development in house, and made a prohibition on allowing web pages to be integrated tightly into the OS. If those electron apps could get the same OS integration in the browse…

This seems... backwards. What integration could MS give to web apps that they aren't already? Microsoft replaced their help file format with HTML starting with Vista. HTML and JS are first-class languages for building UWP apps. If anything, it's Netscape's lawsuit against MS for bundling IE that kept them from doing more to integrate web pages into the OS, not the moving of browser development in-house.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#247

Post by bartread »

pimeys wrote: post #191
bartread wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think times have changed though. Functional languages just weren't big back then the way they are now. Back in those days Haskell was sloooooooow. There's 17 years of runtime and compiler optimisation, not to mention MUCH faster hardware, that's been developed in between. It's now totally realistic to use the expressive power of functional languages on real-world workloads in a way that it mostly wasn't back in Y2K.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#248

Post by efdee »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #240
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?

> Node/Electron with dozens of MB of runtime and all that Javascript stuff? What went wrong that we end up with this? I'll tell you. Microsoft and Apple need to protect their native app license revenue, so they hobbled Netscape, brought browser development in house, and made a prohibition on allowing web pages to be integrated tightly into the OS. If those electron apps could get the same OS integration in the browse…

I don't think they can tightly integrate web pages into their OS after the whole antitrust thing.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#249

Post by mike_hearn »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #134
mike_hearn wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's just no way to develop a GUI application (especially a cross-platform one) without shipping something large That's not quite true. Check out these Avian examples: https://readytalk.github.io/avian/ Fully statically linked Java cross-platform GUI app (using SWT) in a 1mb download.

Java implies it needs the JRE, so add that to it as well. Of course, Electron probably relies on OS-specific UI libraries as well (although only a little), which should also be considered I guess.

No. Avian is a standalone JVM and that 1mb includes everything. No dependencies at all.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#250

Post by alain_gilbert »

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…

Same story here !

For nostalgia's sake, may I ask what games/software you developed at the time ?

On my end, I did:

  - Snake, and a Snake level editor,
  - Sokoban, and a Sokoban level editor,
  - an adventure game Zelda (NES) alike (but was not fun at all !)
  - Graphic calculator (to help me visualize the change of parameters quickly),
  - a software to visualize my grades compared to the rest of the group
  - I made a software to search and categorize html tags
(during my high school years)

What impressed me the most at the time, was that my binary file compiled on Windows ME would work directly on my other computer with Windows 3.1.

This is something I still really enjoy today with Go(lang); the fact that I can just compile for other platforms and run it natively.

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