Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

blog.marcocantu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 344 posts

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#271

Post by dfox »

pjmlp wrote: post #149
ealexhudson wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They produced Kylix not that long ago - I had an original box set once upon a time. I have no idea why that didn't take off, but it was an excellent environment really.

> I have no idea why that didn't take off, but it was an excellent environment really. - It was a wrapper around Qt - Had some dependencies on Wine - The set of available controls was small - It was closed source - They expected GNU/Linux developers to be willing to pay for it

To clarify: dependency on wine means that the IDE was essentially windows application (stripped-down delphi) running on top of wine . Wine was not required for deployment of applications.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#272

Post by vintagedave »

coldtea wrote: post #214
ptero wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The beauty is in the eye of the beholder (and I put IMOs liberally in my post). The OP mentioned GUI prototyping and I was viewing Tk in this context. For rapid prototyping, Tk is a better solution for me, by far. It is a very simple, script language that allows creating dynamic GUIs on the fly. I can make a simple GUI and hang calls on buttons and menus with a few lines of text. No compiling. No library mismatches t…

> 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.

> It will be limited to Windows, though, I'll give you that.

Rather, it'll be limited to Windows, macOS, iOS and Android. :)

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#273

Post by vintagedave »

kofejnik wrote: post #265
mamcx wrote: post #187

I'm moderator in one of the oldest/largest delphi forum in latin-america: http://clubdelphi.com/ Ironically, I don't use Delphi anymore. Yet, I still help people with it and defend it when is possible. Delphi is amazing . It only have a HUGE problem: His owners. You can re4ad why Delphi fade away here: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Borland-fail?share=1 "Borland lost its way when executive management decided to change…

yep, just checked, minimal useful Delphi license is ~$1500, which is a non-starter for most people outside of corporate environment consequently, you can never just pick it up and grow into it, you only learn it on the job which already uses it or maybe, you torrent it

There is a free version. Download Starter.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#274

Post by dfox »

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…

I would say that problem is not in the language but only in the surrounding ecosystem.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#275

Post by dfox »

matwood wrote: post #74
jsudhams wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Completely agree. It's hard to beat VB6 for LOB CRUD apps.

It was always my impression that Delphi is significantly more productive for LOB CRUD than VB. In Delphi you can create meaningful CRUD applications in which all the manually written code consist of single-line methods of the FooForm.ShowModal variety.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#276

Post by dfox »

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…

There is simple counterargument: there is integrated runtime for webapps in windows since at least windows 98 (probably since 95 desktop update bundled with IE4). Just rename HTML file to .hta. Running that gets you IE window without any browser UI and scripts in the page run outside any sandbox and can interact with windows API anyway they want. Various windows components are exactly this.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#278

Post by erikpukinskis »

dfox wrote: post #276
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…

There is simple counterargument: there is integrated runtime for webapps in windows since at least windows 98 (probably since 95 desktop update bundled with IE4). Just rename HTML file to .hta. Running that gets you IE window without any browser UI and scripts in the page run outside any sandbox and can interact with windows API anyway they want. Various windows components are exactly this.

Most users can't rename files, so this feature de facto doesn't exist.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#279

Post by erikpukinskis »

craigvn wrote: post #269
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…

2005 called and want's it's arguments back. Microsoft has been moving a lot of products to the web where possible, for example Office 365.

That doesn't contradict anything I said.

Historically, the web version of office is not really a stand-alone product, and is designed to be a helpful feature for people who primarily use office on a Windows PC.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#280

Post by alex_duf »

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…

It's really cool to see how many people shared the same experience!

In random order, and off the top of my head:

    - pong
    - some various demo where I would simulate fireworks or 
      traveling through star (in other words particles that are
      rendered by drawing dots and circles on screen)
    - a car racing game viewed from the top
    - an RPG engine but never actually made a level
    - a claw machine
    - and finally my own remake of space invader where you could
      play up to 4 in coop and upgrade your weapons. It had bosses
      and swarms of enemies. I learn then there was a limit of how
      many keys you can press on a keyboard before your computer starts beeping.
Post reply on HN