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I miss Delphi

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Re: I miss Delphi

#11

Post by hboon »

jarjoura wrote: post #5

Delphi had its place in 2001 along with NeXT's WebObjects. Products of their time for sure. However, the developer inspectors alone inside of Chrome and Safari are 100x more powerful than any of those old UI tools of the past.

100x more powerful than the Visual Builder in VisualAge suite of products [1] and Dolphin Smalltalk's MVP-based tool and code browsers [2]?

While those (along with Delphi's VCL) are now a shadow of their past or completely defunct, I doubt anything comes close to them technically, let alone 100x more powerful than them.

PS: I just missed that this is about Web development though. Will just leave the comment here for posterity.

[1] http://www.edm2.com/index.php/VisualAge_for_Java_Professiona...

[2] http://www.samadhiweb.com/blog/2015.12.31.dolphin.nbsqlite3....

Re: I miss Delphi

#12

Post by oneweekwonder »

Me to! I'm still of the opinion Lazarus apps looks the best cross-platform, compared to QT, GTK, wxWidgets.

I wonder if there is work out there for objects pascal. Because I would like to apply.

But for now... twoottwoot* hybrid train, here we come :'(

Re: I miss Delphi

#13

Post by insertnickname »

badminton1 wrote: post #9

You have major open source libraries like GTK, wxWidgets, Qt. Also .NET, Java which offer multiple ways of doing forms that are tied to the target platform. In addition, RealBasic (now Xojo) and... Delphi. After Borland, other companies continued working with Delphi, namely, Embarcadero: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi Now, the prices can be a bit prohibitive. I would try one of the open source ones.

Note that Vala is apparently more or less dead.

Re: I miss Delphi

#14

Post by [deleted] »

badminton1 wrote: post #9

You have major open source libraries like GTK, wxWidgets, Qt. Also .NET, Java which offer multiple ways of doing forms that are tied to the target platform. In addition, RealBasic (now Xojo) and... Delphi. After Borland, other companies continued working with Delphi, namely, Embarcadero: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi Now, the prices can be a bit prohibitive. I would try one of the open source ones.

[deleted]

Re: I miss Delphi

#15

Post by pjmlp »

pron wrote: post #10
pjmlp wrote: post #6

Me too, that is why I try to stick with native development with Java, .NET (all its variants), Android, iOS stacks whenever possible.

I recently had to write a desktop GUI app, and chose Electron[1] because I figured that for once I'd try something new and hip with lots of OSS libraries because it wasn't too critical and I needed to pass it on to someone else and figured there are lots of frontend web devs around. Well, it's kinda OK, but man, that thing is held together with spit and baling wire, and you feel like it's all going to come down with…

What I mostly hate in webdev is exactly that, helding together with spit and baling wire, a pile of HTML tags meant for document publishing, CSS and JavaScript, while pretending the browser is a proper application VM.

Than switching browsers, including the same one but a different version, and start implementing workarounds. Multiplying this experience for each browser/version/OS required by the customer.

Re: I miss Delphi

#16

Post by frik »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #7
dvh wrote: post #2

- empty form will have 24+16 lines of code in 2 files - you will have to pay 3000 per seat per 6 months to make a website - it only works on windows - hello world have full access to all user's data - you paid 3000 and it still cannot reliably add main icon to your app (XE6) - you cannot increment build number from command line - no job posting in last 12 months - nobody is using it

VB6 and Planet Source Code also have lots of nostalgia for me. Fun times with AIM toolz, Half-Life cheats, and crackme.exes.

Have fond memory of PSC as well. It was cool and featureful before Sourceforge and later Github came along.

Re: I miss Delphi

#17

Post by petra »

Want simple development ? go for low-code environments, that simplify a lot and use gui tools where possible(models, workflows, forms,etc). There are plenty tools of those sort, and at least the best of them(mendix/outsystems) may scale pretty well in complexity of applications created in them.

Re: I miss Delphi

#18

Post by pjmlp »

oneweekwonder wrote: post #12

Me to! I'm still of the opinion Lazarus apps looks the best cross-platform, compared to QT, GTK, wxWidgets. I wonder if there is work out there for objects pascal. Because I would like to apply. But for now... twoot twoot* hybrid train, here we come :'(

> I wonder if there is work out there for objects pascal. Because I would like to apply.

Delphi is still kind of popular in Europe, we even have conferences.

https://entwickler-konferenz.de/

Re: I miss Delphi

#19

Post by pjmlp »

insertnickname wrote: post #13
badminton1 wrote: post #9

You have major open source libraries like GTK, wxWidgets, Qt. Also .NET, Java which offer multiple ways of doing forms that are tied to the target platform. In addition, RealBasic (now Xojo) and... Delphi. After Borland, other companies continued working with Delphi, namely, Embarcadero: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi Now, the prices can be a bit prohibitive. I would try one of the open source ones.

Note that Vala is apparently more or less dead.

Yep, GNOME seems to be adopting Rust, with librsvg and GNOME Builder being the first places to spot it.

Re: I miss Delphi

#20

Post by realharo »

Simple is subjective. I find the React way of making web UIs, where you just write a `render` function, way simpler than manually mutating existing UI widgets to match the data every time it changes. Or some weird manual data binding via model wrappers.

Maybe it's a tiny bit more code in the very beginning, but it becomes worth it very soon (as soon as you get past hello world pretty much).

That being said, we could always have better tooling, even for this paradigm.

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