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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

#251

Post by Arcsech »

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…

I always thought the new Visual Studio pricing model was a good way to go for this: Free for teams of I suppose if you go that route you need a legal team that can afford to be on the lookout for violators though.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#252

Post by erikpukinskis »

iajrz wrote: post #245
erikpukinskis wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well there's Office.

But also you provide the content which makes Windows licenses have value. If there were no Windows apps, they couldn't price it higher than Linux.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#253

Post by mattmanser »

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.

Deployment, it's always been about deployment.

Gone were the days of having dB passwords on every machine and wandering from PC to PC with a floppy or CD.

And that was the problem with desktop apps 10 years ago.

Even when MS fixed deployment for desktop apps they still left it massively overcomplicated. It should have been a simple one click in visual studio to build an installer and it never was.

One click deployment was/is pretty awful too that came out just as Google pioneered background updates.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#254

Post by erikpukinskis »

cwyers wrote: post #246
erikpukinskis wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Start menu integration, USB device access, graphics and sound APIs, notifications...

Just look at the Windows APIs there are a wealth of things Microsoft doesn't want in browsers if they can avoid it.

Well... there are people on the browser team trying their best, but the resource constraints keep investment where it needs to be to protect Windows and Office licensing.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#255

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

Joeri wrote: post #185
Karunamon wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's no money in devtools for general desktop app development. Embarcadero knows that the only way to grow the delphi userbase is to make it free, so they're instead trying to milk it for all it's worth on the way down. I had a bit of hope for delphi with mobile app support, but the pricing really killed it now that microsoft offers xamarin for free. Plus, object pascal is too weird for js coders. C-style syntax i…

I don't agree making it free is the only option. Delphi is now multiplatform. There are several companies with a development tool targeted at just one of these platforms, charging money for it - usually not much, but the subscription model makes it more expensive in the long run. Imagine having just Delphi for Android free. If I could release the same app for iPhone by coughing up $200, why shouldn't I? They could also release a basic version at a very low price, unlocking features in the more expensive editions. Yes, they can actually study the usage cases and examine what extra features are indispensable for current paid customers but could be removed in the basic version without much problem for an average developer. There are so many ways they could play this out, I'm really disappointed they've chose this route.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#256

Post by theprotocol »

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.

Yes! Winforms is extremely underrated these days. I find it much more productive (and efficient) than WPF.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#257

Post by RodericDay »

alain_gilbert wrote: post #250
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 softwa…

This is one thing I really really liked about Go, but unfortunately I don't really like the rest of Go very much. What are other languages that have this property? Building an ".exe" I can send to a Windows user is not a pleasant exercise in Python.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#258

Post by Colex »

RodericDay wrote: post #257
alain_gilbert wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 softwa…

This is one thing I really really liked about Go, but unfortunately I don't really like the rest of Go very much. What are other languages that have this property? Building an ".exe" I can send to a Windows user is not a pleasant exercise in Python.

For windows, you can use .Net (which usually comes by default on windows distributions, so you should be able to send it and run without any issues). C# is a good language that uses it.

So it's not really native (it runs on a VM), but it produces the .exe that can be easily shared.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#259

Post by matmo »

tazjin wrote: post #111
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…

It's not just that the language is bad, it's also that the ecosystem encourages bloat and terrible implementations with layers of fixes glued on top of each other. My current main work laptop (a pre-TouchBar generation MBP) can only barely run a "heavy" JS-application like Slack and something like IntelliJ at the same time. Migrating Slack into an IRC client reduces the CPU & memory footprint of _sending, receiving a…

>My current main work laptop (a pre-TouchBar generation MBP) can only barely run a "heavy" JS-application like Slack and something like IntelliJ at the same time.

Is this hyperbole? I run both of these with IntelliJ memory settings maxed out on a MPB no problem. Granted, I have 16GB of memory, so understandably YMMV.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#260

Post by TimJYoung »

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.…

When you're making half a million or more each year writing vertical market software, the price tag for a Delphi/RAD Studio license each year is irrelevant. This is especially true when Delphi was the reason why you're making all that money in the first place.

It's kind of a "you had to have been there..." type of story, but if you get a chance, talk to a developer that was trying to create Windows applications for businesses back in the 90's and you will know what I mean. The really sad part is that while .NET and C# have done an okay job of providing a replacement (I think that MS has a hard time staying on-point when it comes to dev tools and make their tools too much of a moving target), you really cannot find anything exactly like Delphi/RAD Studio today. The primary reason why it's so sad is that Delphi created millions upon millions of dollars of revenue for independent software vendors all over the world, and you would think that companies would be trying to replicate that success. Alas, it's hard to contemplate even attempting such an endeavor when developer tools are not valued properly according to the money that they make the developer. If the software world finds a way to start making money from developer tools again, then you'll see another Delphi and it will be a lot cheaper.

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