If you haven't written apps in Delphi, you can't appreciate how easy it was to write interactive GUIs.
It was a freaking miracle, and I wonder how we have managed to lose SO much ground.
I miss Delphi
141–150 of 194 posts
Re: I miss Delphi
#142I miss Visual FoxPro. I have never been more productive in my whole life. Of course compared to today's languages that's an abomination to say, but the tools, the data browser and the sql embedded in the language made it shine on its own merits.
I miss FoxPro from pre-visual days (2.5).
Re: I miss Delphi
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
My one brush with Borland C++'s GUI builder was that the developers were doing things like setting the colour of a UI component based on some state (like the background colour of a text box for example), and then elsewhere in the program, checking the colour of that component to make some decision... I don't blame this on Borland. Nonetheless.. I ran.
When used well Borland C++ builder was one of the most productive tools for application development on windows. One day someone will make something like it for the web and make a few billion.
It was called Dreamweaver
Re: I miss Delphi
#144I did professional development in Delphi for 13 years, writing and maintaining a sprawling 700k line reservation system. I don't miss it much. It was a great learning experience to have to fill in all the gaps in the standard libraries by twisting and turning Pascals rigid rules into something semi-useful; writing foreign function interfaces to WinSock to get around the limitations in the provided toy socket implemen…
(I'm moderator on http://clubdelphi.com ) You experience is more a reflex on the nose-dive that management than what the tool/language is; including the Interbase engine, that was open-sourced then become closed fast. Bad code is normal across enterprise applications, but even taking into account the RAD biased approach of the Delphi IDE is easy to do good coding. What is not easy is to have badly-trained developers…
My experience is 13 years of trying really hard to do the right thing within a sinking ship. Yes, we where young and inexperienced; and yes the foundation of the system was built using what turned out to be the worst turds in Delphi; and yes, I agree that it's possible to build better software in Delphi. But no, really; enough is enough; unless you're absolutely forced to, I see no advantages in choosing Delphi these days.
Re: I miss Delphi
#145I hope that isn't considered too much self-promotion, but it's on topic. You can have what you want with our product, Elevate Web Builder. It creates single-page web applications in a Delphi-like IDE: http://www.elevatesoft.com/products?category=ewb&type=web (examples at the bottom) We're releasing version 2.06 shortly, and it has much-improved designer drawing performance and design-time/run-time layout performance.…
I couldn't help but notice that your component library doesn't include a TreeView component, do you have this planned for the near future?
Re: I miss Delphi
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
When used well Borland C++ builder was one of the most productive tools for application development on windows. One day someone will make something like it for the web and make a few billion.
It was called Dreamweaver
Oh the days of WYSIWYG HTML editors. I still find websites that have the Dreamweaver change-image-on-hover JavaScript. They still work on older browsers though...
Re: I miss Delphi
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not following re: lack of library support. Pascal links with C. ??
It does, but you still need to manually declare all the types and functions. And then, since it's C, you also have to deal with low-level stuff like memory management for strings and other buffers. Whereas someone working with, say, C# or Java, can just go and find a library that's native to their language, ready to use out of the box (even if internally it wraps that very same C library). It's the usual curse of a s…
Oh. I used SWIG to automate a lot of that. It'll build the wrappers for you. The upside with it is that you don't have to wait for package maintainers to update your bindings.
Re: I miss Delphi
#148What killed Delphi:
1. Embarcadero nee Borland always building new "cool" features (e.g. IoT) rather than core functionality (64 bit only recently, compiler slow, IDE crashes).
2. User base now mostly supporting old applications so require high level levels of backwards compatibility (with poor or broken APIs).
3. Loss of good libraries. Originally they had good libraries (and culturally the source was available for a few extra $$). Now libraries are poor, there is little incentive to make new libs, and the target is fragmented for library writers (many Devs are stuck on a variety of older versions - upgrades are costly, and upgrade reliability is erratic).
Re: I miss Delphi
#149I miss C++ Builder
I thought C++/CX + UWP could fill that gap, but it isn't quite the same, but still way better than VC++ + MFC/ATL ever was.
Did you see C++/WinRT?
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/mt745094.aspx
Now that looks promising.
Re: I miss Delphi
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your talking about the difference between immediate mode vs retained mode, immediate mode being the "self contained render" method. This is nice and clean up to a point in complexity, and then the advantages of retained mode (or "manually mutating existing UI widgets to match the data every time it changes") outweigh the disadvantages, namely the management of the UI/data interface.
What are the advantages of retained mode UI (genuinely curious)? Assuming you have good enough primitives to work with (i.e. you write your render function in terms of HTML elements and other React components - or something similar, not raw lines and rectangles), then I just don't see any.
Rather than repeat, I will just link you to:
http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/24103/immediate-g...