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I miss Delphi

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: I miss Delphi

#61

Post by mixedCase »

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

> you paid 3000 and it still cannot reliably add main icon to your app (XE6)

You just gave me a humongous rush of nostalgia from when I was 12 and always had Resource Hacker open to make my apps look "professional" on every compilation. Thank you.

Re: I miss Delphi

#62

Post by gglitch »

supercoder wrote: post #29
mtkd wrote: post #25

If anyone using Delphi to build big apps in early 90s was told that to do the same function in 25 years time they would need HTML, CSS, JS, Ruby or PHP or similar, some SQL, some Rust or Go and probably a few DSLs - it would take months longer to build - require multiple servers - and would need more test code than app code to get it 98% as stable - you wouldn't have believed a word of it. Every single time I have to…

You're still using Rust / Go ? I've been using Luna on the Rocket stack, with Huston for distribution and Apollo for stack management, and it fixes mostly all the problems you've mentioned.

Houston's great for monitoring.

Re: I miss Delphi

#63

Post by johansch »

Svip wrote: post #30

I work with Delphi professionally. And we maintain a code base of about 150,000 lines of Pascal and about 300,000 lines of T-SQL (written to work in both Sybase and Microsoft SQL). Delphi may be easy, but it's not simple. Once you get into the meat of things, Delphi's ecosystem truly becomes a limitation. Delphi's main drawback is its lack of library availability. If you are in the marked for modern technology, using…

This makes me think of when I was writing CGI web apps in Turbo Pascal 6.0 running on Windows 95 using AOLserver (I think) in 1995 or so. (Even back then I remember that it felt odd, like two worlds of computing colliding in an unexpected manner. This was just before I got into Linux/SunOS/Unix - perhaps mostly because it felt like it was the way to for the web backend, and the web obviously seemed like something to bet on.)

Turbo Pascal fealt great then (everything was coherent, relatively well-designed, speedy, etc), but after recently looking back at the code from then.. ehh.. we have better things now.

(Except perhaps in ease of getting started - for beginners.)

Re: I miss Delphi

#64

Post by digler999 »

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…

I worked for a (casino) gaming company that thought electron would be appropriate for a production slot machine. I expressed serious doubts that JS was the right language for a graphics appliance, but I didnt want to take control of the situation. A few months later, there was memory fragmentation and leaks that nobody could figure out. That company went belly up shortly thereafter.

Re: I miss Delphi

#65

Post by integricho »

supercoder wrote: post #29
mtkd wrote: post #25

If anyone using Delphi to build big apps in early 90s was told that to do the same function in 25 years time they would need HTML, CSS, JS, Ruby or PHP or similar, some SQL, some Rust or Go and probably a few DSLs - it would take months longer to build - require multiple servers - and would need more test code than app code to get it 98% as stable - you wouldn't have believed a word of it. Every single time I have to…

You're still using Rust / Go ? I've been using Luna on the Rocket stack, with Huston for distribution and Apollo for stack management, and it fixes mostly all the problems you've mentioned.

This is either sarcasm / joke, or the top of the current hype-berg.

Re: I miss Delphi

#67

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

While I don't necessarily want a Delphi-like thing for Web development, I do want a Delphi-like thing for developing GUI desktop applications.

So far I've tried out a few things, but for some reason they don't "feel" the same as Delphi did. Maybe it's because I'm older and have moved on to different tools, or maybe it's because I haven't made the time to properly invest in these.

Anyways, here's what I've played with:

- NetBeans - Has a form builder, I'm comfortable with Java, it's cross-platform enough. I'm not sure why I've never used it for my personal GUI apps, even though I've built a bunch of little things to use for work.

- SharpDevelop - Looks great, checks all the boxes for doing GUI development, but I'm not comfortable enough with C# or VB.NET to use it effectively.

- Lazarus - Currently playing with this now. Feels a lot like Delphi (as it should!). I'm disappointed in how much Object Pascal/Delphi I've forgotten though. It brings back a lot of good memories though.

Re: I miss Delphi

#68

Post by muraiki »

realharo wrote: post #20

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…

You may be surprised to learn that React's paradigm is basically how Windows GUI apps have been written from 1.0 up through at least Windows 7: https://bitquabit.com/post/the-more-things-change/
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