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Why I Choose Delphi

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Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#171

Post by Johnny_Brahms »

tomcam wrote: post #91
Johnny_Brahms wrote: post #90

As 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 ma…

Impressive. What is the codebase?

Journal-system and everything what that means for medium-to-large health care providers.

Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#172

Post by samuell »

analognoise wrote: post #34

I'm going to make the same comment that comes up every time I see Delphi and Lazarus/FreePascal: If you haven't tried Lazarus/FreePascal, you're missing out. It's really amazing, and it's truly free.

Yesss! Being able to drop a few buttons, code a few lines, and compile, and get a statically compiled binary / exe file with native GUI, on all the three desktop platform (without any code change between them!) is just mind blowing if you tried any other GUI builder. This is how GUIs should be made. Period. :)

Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#173

Post by JohnStrange »

SyneRyder wrote: post #49
skrebbel wrote: post #14

I'm very sad that Delphi is so inaccessible for hobbyists. In some spare hours I'm building a native app in Qt, but I'd have definitely built it with Delphi if I wouldn't have had to cough up 3000 dollars just to get started. In all frankness I don't get why Embarcadero doesn't copy Qt's licensing. If they make a free GPL version, Delphi-based open source could thrive while just about everybody who buys a license now…

There's Delphi Starter Edition, which is free for freeware / personal use projects, and 'free' for commercial apps until you've earned $1000 in total revenue. (At which point, they want you to buy a ~$2000 license. Hmm.) https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter

That's the annoying thing. Why don't these companies say you can use it for free or for cheap until you've earned 10000 in total, and then you have to buy a license that costs less. That way you could put the money aside in your calculations and it would be no problem. The DAW Reaper has this kind of licence, you only have to buy the commercial version if you make more than 20,000 USD gross revenue per year.

It's the same with commercial CommonLisps, I'd love to use one, but the pricing is ridiculous for small companies / hobby programmers. That doesn't add up, you'd have to be 100% sure that you'll earn more than X dollars with your application and you can never be sure of that.

Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#174

Post by JohnStrange »

duncan_bayne wrote: post #87
skrebbel wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm programming desktop applications in Racket, but unfortunately for many purposes it is, as of now, too slow. Especially application startup time is painful, and text% and other essential components of the GUI are way too sluggish for professional end-consumer applications. Maybe the Chez-based rewrite will help, but I'm not betting on it. Parts of the GUI library are just too complicated, and sometimes for no good reason (for example, style lists or the way it deals with snips internally).

I'm probably ending up with prototyping in Racket and writing the final application in Qt or Lazarus.

Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#175

Post by striking »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #99
peterburkimsher wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dead like Hypercard?

I'm really surprised Apple hasn't come up with something in this space, not everyone is a programmer but most people have things they could do with automating a little.

See AppleScript and Automator.

Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#176

Post by phatbyte »

I've always hated the Delphi ecosystem, awesome IDE, good-enough language, but everything else sucked, specially if you are a young programmer with limited money, you couldn't learn it unless you pirated it, even .NET had a free version. Everything there had a price-tag, from the IDE to the third-party libraries.

So yeah, everyone moved on from Delphi, it's currently on palliative care, probably won't die any time soon, but it's becoming irrelevant as time goes by. If it wasn't for this post I wouldn't even remember it. We have much better technologies and IDE today. Good riddance Delphi.

Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#177

Post by mamcx »

dwc wrote: post #158
omnibrain wrote: post #57

The IDE is just so far behind the competition. Crashing all the time an slow. Theming support ist very limited (to date). Delphi Code Insight ("Intellisense") is slow and sometimes just refuses to work and is generally not on par with other offerings. Error Insight (the wiggly red lines thing) is even worse. Delphi still uses a single pass compiler which makes for great compilation speed but seriously limits the lang…

> The pricing is just out of this wolrd. You get the impression that they try to squeeze every last penny out of their existing user base. I used to think that about Delphi, various commercial Lisp implementations, etc. But after some time I've changed my view a little. My change is because I realized that Delphi had its chance, and kept on trying as the chance slipped away. No amount of competitive pricing today is…

> No amount of competitive pricing today is going to make a resurgence of Delphi happen.

I disagree. Delphi is still great, and with a less tone-deaf it could get very well.

Note that Delphi still have a healthy position today:

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

(Position 9, above Ruby! and others!)

(As much as we can debate about Tiobe and other indexs, is important to note that is still way higher that many will expect, and the flow of information we see in the community is very good, much more than many other hispers options)

The thing is that price is in fact the main problem. This kill the open source ecosystem options around it.

I will totally, like many others (I know, I'm moderator in on of the most important forum in Latin-America) work more for it but without a way to reach a large audience it kill many ideas we have.

Delphi was the most sucesfully opensource but commercial (as, you have the source) with many thirdy-party options. Think like the current React-Components market but maybe larger and years ago.

Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#178

Post by mamcx »

int_19h wrote: post #56
chadcmulligan wrote: post #53

For 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. ~

> WinForms is so similar to VCL

But very inferior. And is slow in contrast.

Delphi is #1 for GUI. Period. Nothing alike, No QT, No Wx, No Winforms or XALM or anything else.

Just what is available in the lowest tier is far more complete that any other tool in the market, and you have sourcecode for the VCL and related components.

Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#179

Post by mamcx »

int_19h wrote: post #63
epx wrote: post #3

I 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 totally agree.

I'm pondering about build a Fox-in-spirit. I still mantain that NO programming tool today is good for database-development, and we need a modern take on the dbase.

My idea is build a relational language with a lot of the ideas of fox but with a modern syntax.

If somebody wanna to talk about this, and maybe help, I'm open!

Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#180

Post by mamcx »

MycroftJones wrote: post #85
int_19h wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

With the exception of the LISP syntax, I agree with you!

I wanna get a relational / kdb+ / ml hybrid.

----

One of the gems of FoxPro was the always-on terminal. It have his own terminal/repl. In the IDE. Always ON. You can do

CREATE FORM name

and open the form as a table

then do

BROWSE

and see how was made. And you could activa the terminal on a shipped app, so you can fix things on the fly.

And the debugger (specially the var windows) was good. To date, no single debugger/var window have bees as good as was with Visual FoxPro.

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