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I miss Delphi

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Re: I miss Delphi

#151

Post by TimJYoung »

revanx_ wrote: post #145
TimJYoung wrote: post #94

I 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?

Yes, it's the one glaring hole right now in the component library, besides a charting control. Both will be addressed before summer.

Our upcoming 2.06 release includes a new menu bar control (horizontal), which was also a sorely-missed control.

Re: I miss Delphi

#152

Post by TimJYoung »

markoutso wrote: post #137
TimJYoung wrote: post #94

I 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.…

That's very impressive. Do you have an example for http://todomvc.com/ ?

Good question - the quick answer is no, but we hope to put one out soon.

Re: I miss Delphi

#153

Post by pjmlp »

zeroc8 wrote: post #149
pjmlp wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, it is still pretty much work in progress, lacking many C++/UWP features to be usable for UWP applications, specially regarding VS XAML editor, Blend integration and UWP controls.

Microsoft is promising feature parity with C++/CX when VS17 comes out, lets see.

In any case, .NET tends to have the spotlight for app development on the MS stack, with C++ getting the low level high performance work, so C++/CX is nice, but as way to expose those low level APIs as UWP controls, just like C++/CLI does for .NET.

Re: I miss Delphi

#154

Post by paxcoder »

codr4life wrote: post #106
revanx_ wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What language did you move to?

That early experience gradually got me motivated enough to learn more powerful tools. These days, Common Lisp ( https://github.com/codr4life/cl4l ) is my preferred tool for most problems; but I'm gradually learning to like Forth as an embedded DSL ( https://github.com/codr4life/lifoo ) and might be convinced to write C ( https://github.com/codr4life/libc4life ) under the right circumstances. I swore early on to never…

Don't know how to put this... The tech/tools you enumerate give me the impression that your problems are not directly related to (commercial) software development.

Re: I miss Delphi

#155

Post by candiodari »

realharo wrote: post #107
muraiki wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Maybe there's a similarity in how it worked under the hood, but the users of those APIs most definitely could not write UIs in that style. In Win32 code, you still have persistent windows with child "windows" (UI controls/widgets) on them, that have UI-specific internal state (such as text, position, links to their own child windows, etc.) that is different and separate from your application's state (variables, data…

> In Win32 code, you still have persistent windows with child "windows" (UI controls/widgets) on them, that have UI-specific internal state (such as text, position, links to their own child windows, etc.) that is different and separate from your application's state (variables, data structures).

I don't get it. This is a property of every UI toolkit. In other words, this goes for the web as well. In the underlying structures, all data exists independently of your application.

If you mean that there's libraries for the web (angular 1) that make it easy to pretend this isn't true, that the contents of your variables are really on screen, similar libraries exist for windows apps as well. Hell, all of those database things like Access, in a way, have just this concept (the language/tooling pretends that the form field for field X IS field X, through bidirectional synchronization).

Also, except for windows 3.0 apps, nobody ever called things like SetWindowText themselves.

Persistence, and the lack of options to turn it off is one the of major pain points with the web as a platform. Even canvas is persistent, which makes no sense at all to me.

And for me at least, there's two huge differences. On windows, very big apps could work together and be open a dozen at a time. A dozen of single-page-app tabs will, on the other hand, slow my Xeon-backed chrome to a crawl. Secondly, I have never seen any webapps that approach the complexity of normal windows apps. The most complex web apps currently are things like Google Docs, and the average is something like a webform. How many years of the web platform do we need to conclude that it has found some way to prevent feature-full applications from being written ?

I've developed plenty of applications for both windows desktop and for the web, and it's pretty clear to me: the web enforces extremely complex methods of doing things. Markup, javascript, RPC (can be HTTP), other language, another data language is the default layer. Adding a single field to a single record type requires knowing HTML, JavaScript, HTTP (how to use HTTP and encode stuff in it), and then backend language (let's say Java), then SQL. ALL of them need to be modified to just modify a record type.

The web is extremely lacking in performance, and is far, far more complex than it needs to be.

"Worse is better" ... Indeed.

Re: I miss Delphi

#156

Post by candiodari »

pjmlp wrote: post #46
dozzie wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood why would anybody choose Pascal over Ada when talking about languages alone.

Because Ada compilers used to be targeted to the military, aviation and corporations with big pockets. Only in the last decade we saw the language getting an usable open source version thanks to the work of Ada Core and their contributions to GNAT. All other surviving Ada compilers are commercial, following the same price practices as usual. So many of us in the Pascal golden days were only able to buy Pascal compile…

This is one aspect of why the DOS/Windows ecosystem swamped away the old software industry. People who worked before windows don't seem to grasp this simple fact.

Tons of variations : Why wasn't UNIX used ? Why did dBase beat all the minicomputer and mainframe solutions ? Why weren't the free C compilers used by hobbyist programmers ? Why did nobody run X11 ?

The answer is this : because doing that cost unreasonable amounts of money.

Either they did so directly, or because necessary hardware cost boatloads. And that happened because of 2 effects : either because it only ran on one kind of architecture that was really, really expensive, or because it required ridiculous amounts of resources.

Re: I miss Delphi

#157

Post by codr4life »

paxcoder wrote: post #154
codr4life wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That early experience gradually got me motivated enough to learn more powerful tools. These days, Common Lisp ( https://github.com/codr4life/cl4l ) is my preferred tool for most problems; but I'm gradually learning to like Forth as an embedded DSL ( https://github.com/codr4life/lifoo ) and might be convinced to write C ( https://github.com/codr4life/libc4life ) under the right circumstances. I swore early on to never…

Don't know how to put this... The tech/tools you enumerate give me the impression that your problems are not directly related to (commercial) software development.

Why not? They're tools, not fashion items. If you dig a bit deeper you'll find an entire category of people writing software using powerful, mature tools. The reason it's not as commercially feasible is that most problems are not really that difficult any more. And since the software won't break every three months because of moving targets, no one will call for your help once it's in place.

Re: I miss Delphi

#158

Post by pjmlp »

BatFastard wrote: post #141

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.

We let the kids run the show and turn a platform for interactive documents into some sort of VM.

Re: I miss Delphi

#159

Post by pjmlp »

acqq wrote: post #132
hboon wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only have experience with VA Smalltalk and VA Java. I used their WebSphere suite of products years later. > I've tried something from VisualAge at that time and it was a pure catastrophe. My conclusion was that it was bought only by the enterprises who decided to force their developers to "use IBM" no matter what. On the contrary, VAS and VAJ was one of the most non-IBM-like products, compared to say Rational Rose…

> Do you remember why it felt that way? Yes: I've really enjoyed using Turbo Pascal in eighties and earned for living developing using Borland products in the early nineties. I've received VA for C++ to evaluate its suitability. After I've installed it it crashed almost on every click, before I was able to even try something usable. Before it would crash, it would be also quite slow to do anything. In short, not comp…

From your description I would assume you got to use the version where IBM tried to create a Smalltalk/Lisp Machine experience for C++, similar to Lucid's Energize C++, which was so resource demanding that IBM gave up on it.

Nowadays we have Apple and Microsoft returning to the idea of using databases to model C++ on the IDEs.

Re: I miss Delphi

#160

Post by tomcam »

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.

You're wasting your time with Luna? I'm using stackless Albus, and use ADD (anticipatory driven development). It eliminates all config and perf issues with the Rocket stack, and leaves me time to contribute to the Satori project.
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