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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

#321

Post by zeroc8 »

vintagedave wrote: post #273
kofejnik wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can't do much with free. It's a waste of time. Give us some affordable professional options (i.e. Windows only professional for 300 bucks or so). Have a look at Jetbrains, they have figured it out.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#322

Post by jacmoe »

AstralStorm wrote: post #312
jacmoe wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you even know what RAD means? 20 years ago, RAD meant that you could drop visual components on a form, add some events, set some properties, and hit the green run button to compile and run it. A very visual way of programming. QtCreator with it's visual designer comes close, but then you have to suffer a more unforgiving syntax (C++), a complex macro compiler (MOC) and not at all easy cross-compilation / distribut…

You could try Free Pascal related Lazarus instead. Netbeans Swing support also comes close.

I have been following Lazarus / Free Pascal for years - and, as it turns out, started using it in earnest one week ago. It's great! :)

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#324

Post by ptero »

vintagedave wrote: post #101
ptero wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO Pascal is a good, clean language and Borland was a top engineering shop that built Delphi as a rapid development tool that supported Windows . At the time there was nothing comparable for Windows development. There was a huge marked for Windows consumer applications and games (Linux was not a household name yet) and very little outside of clumsy Visual Studio to write them. I recall reading at WSJ at the time tha…

> no Linux targets? Linux is coming in the next release - there will be a blog on that soon. It already has Mac, iOS, and Android on top of its Windows support. Honestly, I do not believe that Python or Tcl/Tk count as "good" RAD cross-platform tools. Only if you've never used something like modern Delphi to compare them to. We regularly have customers give feedback about their productivity with Delphi/C++Builder, ve…

David, thank you for the work on Delphi! I think my post was seen as bashing Delphi. It was not the intent; the fact that Delphi has a thriving user community willing to defend it is a proof to its usefulness.

To each his own. I work in a cross platform world with a roughly equal mix of Linux and Windows and my personal preferences are with the standard Unix toolset.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#325

Post by barrkel »

dfox wrote: post #266
barrkel wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fractio…

Problem with Delphi-style RAD tools is that there is huge step in complexity between things that can be done in the designer and these that can not. And this invites particular style of "programming" that consists of searching the internet for existing components and connecting these components together with horrible hacks. It is perfectly possible to write well-structured application in Delphi, but most are not. [Ed…

I don't really want to get into a long-winded discussion, but (a) the GUI definition in Delphi is also code (specifically: there's a declarative syntax for constructing a tree of components with property values); and (b) positioning is handled by the VCL. Typically you specify things like alignments and borders in the designer, and the VCL takes care of keeping things positioned.

I really wish HTML was as easy to design with as the VCL designer. Trying to e.g. create vertically centered children is far, far easier in the VCL than in HTML + CSS.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#326

Post by lojack »

mattmanser wrote: post #314
lojack wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use web apps at my company because almost all developers know how to make them, not all computers are windows PCs, and you don't need to install anything of download anything for someone to use them. If you're talking about electron apps, that's a whole other ballgame. We don't build electron apps for internal stuff afaik.

To be fair to him, it used to be that everyone knew how to make desktop apps and no-one knew how to make web apps. So that's definitely not the reason.

I can tell you with 100% certainty that the primary reason we build webapps for internal products at my company is because all the developers already know it. I understand this is more of an anecdote, but I really find it hard to believe other companies aren't making similar decisions.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#327

Post by interfixus »

masklinn wrote: post #34
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?

> Funny thing is, I am just getting into Go, and you know what? Hello World is 1MB?

Exactly :)

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#328

Post by WorldMaker »

problems wrote: post #108
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…

The problem with it as a compilation target in my experience is that interacting with other libraries becomes challenging - the JS ecosystem is now huge, but if you want to use many of those libraries from a wrapping language, it's possible but might present many challenges. Like Typescript definition files. Producing them on a massive libraries is near impossible for a single individual to undertake. I've seen some…

I think writing Typescript definitions for a massive library is usually pretty straight forward and I've got a few that I haven't minded writing/helping maintain. "Good enough" typings can be very quick and easy to build and "Perfect" typings take time sometimes but nowhere near "impossible".

Furthermore, Typescript recently made it much easier to work with libraries that have no typings at all. If you don't mind implicit anys, things might just work. If you are strict about no implicit anys then the minimum boiler plate to define a module with any type has dropped to a bare minimum:

    declare module 'module-name'
If I have a complaint in that space, it's that sharing typings is a lot more complex than I think it should be. DefinitelyTyped is a single megarepo where most typings originate and has developed a culture of trying to get typings perfect. Unfortunately, perfect is the enemy of the good, and "good enough" typings for lesser used libraries often languish in PR obscurity, at least in my experience.

Beyond DefinitelyTyped, libraries can embed their own typings in their npm packages, which is great, but not every library author is thrilled to "own" Typescript typings. (All in all, I still feel like I have better luck contributing typings directly to library authors than DT, though.) Beyond that there are tools like Typings to grab typing files from arbitrary GitHub repos, for instance, but there's not much of a good way to advertise types that way because most people will only check NPM now.

Sorry, this seems to have turned into more of an off topic rant than I at first intended.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#329

Post by WorldMaker »

astine wrote: post #146
zubspace wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully agree. I sometimes wonder, why so many people jump to fancy frameworks like WPF where you need to create the markup yourself. I can spit out interfaces for desktop apps in no time with good old winforms but struggle to write data-bindings, triggers and what not in other frameworks. And it even looks consistent and the tools are generally easy to adjust and extend.

You don't need to write the markup yourself with WPF. You can drag components into the designer just the same as with winforms assuming you are using Visual Studio, and everything will look pretty standard unless you go out of your way to change it. As to the databinding, I find that WPF has more upfront work in databinding, in that you actually have to write some code, but that it's a lot more flexible in the long r…

I think there is an interesting learning curve point where once a developer gets used to WPF layouting/templating, databinding, and MVVM patterns that developer will forever after be way more productive on WPF than WinForms.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#330

Post by WorldMaker »

cwyers wrote: post #284
erikpukinskis wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Start menu integration, USB device access, graphics and sound APIs, notifications... You can get all that through UWP, though, can't you?

You can even get access to all of that from a webpage, if you know how to ask. [1]

[1] https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/bridges/hosted...

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