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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

#331

Post by gerryk »

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…

This sounds like me, except the year was 1986, and the software on the bunch of floppies was Borland Turbo Pascal. Included photocopied manuals too.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#333

Post by GFischer »

irfanka wrote: post #216
marcosdumay wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so I learned as much English as I could so I could understand that manual. :) I started learning English as a kid to understand what was happening on the MS BASIC programs I could get on my computer by the time.

Same thing here! I never would've learned English if it wasn't for GW BASIC and Windows 98 - certainly not in the crappy schools of the post-war Bosnia!

I also got started on GW-BASIC (on DOS 3.3).

Twenty years later, I'm still writing way too much Basic code (VB6 legacy apps and some VB.NET). I do appreciate a lot of things about the syntax and wish C# had picked them (no semicolons and no case sensitivity).

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#334

Post by zeroc8 »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #60
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think Delphi will die, but only because it costs a fortune today. I agree with your diagnosis. The problem is that Embarcadero doesn't understand that, and when it does (or when someone else buys Delphi), it may well be much too late to revive it. They could really position various versions of the product in a different way, making the lower tier more affordable.

I think they do understand that, they just see their opportunity elsewhere. The reason is the only price that would satisfy the complainers is free, which isn't going to be very profitable. There is a community of locked in customers who are wiling to pay to keep their projects going, it makes sense for Embarcadero to milk them.

Don't think it needs to be free. Just priced reasonably. Jetbrains seems to be thriving. And their IDEs do not cost thousands of Euros.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#335

Post by AstralStorm »

overgard wrote: post #227
Figs wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 me…

Qt is borderline its own operating system. (I like Qt, but it does probably more than it should).

Qt is split into chunks, you can skip parts of non-core you do not use.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#336

Post by anthk »

ptero wrote: post #76
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?

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…

>Now there are IMO much better cross platform tools for RAD (Python, Tcl/Tk,

TCL/TK is about 20 years old if not more.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#337

Post by rkeene2 »

nomel wrote: post #208
coldtea wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now there are IMO much better cross platform tools for RAD (Python, Tcl/Tk, ...) and Delphi is showing its age Tk is the better than Delphi RAD tool?

I'm assuming this person hasn't actually used Delphi...or Python Tcl/Tk. I can throw together a very nice looking GUI app in one sitting in Delphi, where laying out the elements and binding and defining events is absolutely trivial. In Python, with Tcl/Tk, I don't. I use C#, qt, or even flask. Tcl/Tk is absolutely not appropriate for RAD GUI development, unless it's at some hello world level of complexity.

For Tcl/Tk, there's vTcl which resembles Visual Basic 3.0 (for Windows) as far as laying things out. It supports all three of Tk's geometry managers (grid, pack, place) and you can simply drag-and-drop your way to a GUI in seconds if you're into that kind of thing.

Further, there are several experimental projects that support running Tcl/Tk over HTTP/HTML rather than X11, Win32, SDL, the current Mac OS X/macOS GUI system.

TkWeb and WubTk are examples of this.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#338

Post by mattmanser »

lojack wrote: post #326
mattmanser wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can tell you, with 100% certainty, that 10 years ago that was not the case.

And there's a really good reason everyone switched.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#339

Post by orionblastar »

I learned UCSD Pascal on an Apple 2e, and then Turbo Pascal on an IBM PC XT in high school. 1984 to 1986. It helped me learn more languages like Ada, we had Janus Ada for DOS.

Delphi 1.02 I got from some CD in a UK magazine sold in the USA. They gave away free copies of commerical software for buying the magazine for $10 or so.

I did better in Visual Basic because I got jobs that required it.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#340

Post by craigvn »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #279
craigvn wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think Office 365 can definitely stand alone and compare with something like Google Apps (GSuite). That many people use it in conjunction with offline Office is more a result of offline Office being the incumbent during the transition.
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