Earlier quoted context omitted.
The UI construction on Delphi is a pleasure. Does something comparable exist for .NET?
WinForms, it is not 'cool' nowadays, but works exactly like VCL+delphi ui designer
Eto.Forms if you're going cross-platform.
Why I Choose Delphi
81–90 of 307 posts
Re: Why I Choose Delphi
#82Re: Why I Choose Delphi
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't the same guy behind both Delphi and C#? Anders Hjelsberg if memory serves.
Let me offer my apologies on behalf of the Danish nation for what we have foisted upon the world: Hejlberg's C#, Stroustrup's C++, Lerdorf's PHP, and Heinemeier Hansson's RoR. TP and Delphi, obviously, require no apologies.
Stroustrup brought sanity those of us that need to touch C based APIs, Hejlberg designed Java as it should have been done properly.
No need to apology for them.
Re: Why I Choose Delphi
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was unique when it first showed up. But on e.g. .NET, you already had all the same stuff with WinForms back in 2002. Indeed, WinForms is so similar to VCL, even when it comes to the overall hierarchy (Object <- Component <- Control sound familiar?), you might look at it and wonder if Microsoft hired someone from Borland to work on .NET back in the day. Of course, it was only their chief architect. ~
Delphi still has an advantage over .net - no dependencies, you can ship a single exe without worrying about dll's, which makes it great for sme's
They are finally fixing it with .NET Native and CoreRT, but to enjoy them you need to target UWP or .NET Core apps.
Re: Why I Choose Delphi
#85I liked Delphi a lot, as I liked Clipper a lot, but technology moved on.
dBase-derived languages in general were a lot of fun. And incredibly productive, basically taylor-made for cranking out CRUD apps. I do ponder sometimes why we don't have something quite like that these days. Oh, people do try, but it's never that simple, and there are always a lot of moving bits with plenty of friction between them. The ease with which I could collect a bunch of data from a form and shove it into a…
I don't, but I'd like to. Most of the online documentation on Foxpro is old, and doesn't convey the magic that I've seen happen with it. I'd love to see some combination of Delphi with Foxpro, probably with LISP syntax and Qt bindings. And a little bit of sugar from haskell and kona languages.
What made Turbo Pascal great was the help system. For every single standard library function, it had a snippet of code that you could cut, paste, run, and tweak.
Re: Why I Choose Delphi
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation. Avoid gratuitous negativity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Who said he wouldn't say those things in a face-to-face conversation? And what's uncivil about them?
What is the purpose of the parent comment? To score a point? To show us all the commenter is smarter than the vulgus?
It passes the "gratuitous negativity" test to me. The same point could have been made without the condescension.
Re: Why I Choose Delphi
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're looking for something more Deplhi-like, why don't you just use .NET? Mostly open source now, tons of 3rd party libraries and component packages available for it, just like Delphi in its glory days.
Because I want a UI that works on Windows and macOS out of the box. Plus I want it to have a tiny memory/CPU footprint and while .NET/WPF is better than the average Electron app I still notice a difference.
Have you tried Racket?
Re: Why I Choose Delphi
#88I've not used Delphi/Pascal seriously for over a decade... and then a month ago, after being fed up with sublime/VScode/atom as my daily drivers for developing python I decided to write my own editor. So I installed Lazarus and within 12 hours I had a working editor which is so much FASTER than [put your JS based editor here]
Is your editor available somewhere? Even just screenshots would be neat.
It is still for personal use, but I really hope that by the end of the summer I'll have something ready for public consumption
Re: Why I Choose Delphi
#89For all you folk talking about pascal and so on, Delphi really isn't about the language imho, it's about the components. The VCL is Delphi's component model, and it just isn't available anywhere else, if you've never used it, download the free starter edition and have a look. You can make applications in minutes, you can make your own components in Delphi as well and include them in the IDE, they look just the same a…
It was unique when it first showed up. But on e.g. .NET, you already had all the same stuff with WinForms back in 2002. Indeed, WinForms is so similar to VCL, even when it comes to the overall hierarchy (Object <- Component <- Control sound familiar?), you might look at it and wonder if Microsoft hired someone from Borland to work on .NET back in the day. Of course, it was only their chief architect. ~
I tried WinForms 10 years ago and IMHO it could not compare in quality to VCL.
Re: Why I Choose Delphi
#90As someone who maintains an unknown but very large(several MLOC) free Pascal code base, I must say that I can't see much reason in the Pascal hate.
Sure, I would love to rewrite the whole thing in Lisp (which is the language that lets me keep my soul), but we are all in all still very happy with the current code base.
A complete recompile is less than 20 minutes, and then about half that time is spent in guile for macro expansion (we have a macro DSL). We have considered porting it to chez scheme, but we rarely do full recompiles.
Pascal lends itself well to big codebase, but will probably never again be a new cool thing. I do however believe that being able to test a big change on a Dev machine in less than 10s gives us a pretty big advantage over similar solutions in other languages.