22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks • Hacker News Board

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#341

Post by zeroc8 » Fri, Feb 17, 2017, 8:24 AM UTC

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 would happily pay. So would many others. Things do not need to be free, they just need to be priced within reason.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#342

Post by edwinyzh » Fri, Feb 17, 2017, 12:53 PM UTC

kol wrote: post #218

aylons wrote: post #15

One of the first environments I ever programmed was Delphi. Had lots of fun with it, and it had a special place in my heart... Fast forward 20 years, and I'm a hardware developer using Altium a lot. As some here may be aware, Altium is a multi-gigabit piece of CAD/EDA behemoth written - and still maintained - in Delphi. 3D, DirectX, everything in Delphi. Just yesterday and today I had easily reproducible BSODs by usi…

We used EurekaLog ( https://www.eurekalog.com/ ) to get nice exceptions and stack traces, even for access violations :) Imagine that: you have a native app, but you also have stack traces like in C# and Java. I loved to use Delphi in the early- and mid-2000s, but unfortunately Delphi jobs disappeared, and I had to switch to C# and Java development.

madExcept is better for this purpose

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#343

Post by lojack » Fri, Feb 17, 2017, 3:46 PM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #338

lojack wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can tell you that I agree completely with that. But, that's not at all what I'm disputing.

People within companies are building web apps because thats what they know. The world has changed in the past 10 years. In response to that, you took a hard line stance that this is "definitely not the reason." I disagree.

I _think_ you're trying to argue about why developers -- as a whole -- have moved towards web apps, but its hard to say because that's not at all what I'm talking about and you haven't made that part clear.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#344

Post by bartread » Sat, Feb 18, 2017, 11:17 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #197

bartread wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be a few years out of date now (no WPF since 2011) but all I remember of Blend is it was so complex to learn and use that it was easier just to hand-code my XAML. Not at all like the GUI builders of yore. That may have changed though.

It is a different mindset, not just dragging boxes around and setting properties. The idea of Bled is to mix those RAD concepts with Photoshop like tooling for designers. I still find it easier than trying to make web pages look like the Photoshop mockups.

For sure, and I'm not saying Blend's a bad tool (far from it). It was just total overkill for what I wanted to do and, if I wanted to use Blend well, I had to read another 800-1000 page book, after the one I'd read to learn WPF and XAML. It just didn't justify the time in terms of what I needed to achieve on a relatively short timescale at that point.