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Why I Choose Delphi

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Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#191

Post by unclebucknasty »

lasermike026 wrote: post #181

Why do people do this to themselves? You can't code in a vacuum. It's about community strength and modernity. If you don't have both you are wasting you time. It's like talking to a island cast away.

>Why do people do this to themselves?

Wow. That's pretty condescending and patronizing.

>It's like talking to a island cast away.

And, that almost sounds like frustrated anger.

>It's about community strength and modernity.

Development is about this? Since when? According to whom?

Why are devs often so opinionated about what other devs do or "should" do?

Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#192

Post by unclebucknasty »

gbersac wrote: post #166
jorgeleo wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But I still miss the old days of drag-N-drop GUI of Delphi, really easy." How many years later and the web still does not catch up.

I think this is because of the unpredictiveness of html/css. The css api is not intuitive and there is difference between browsers.

True, but we've solved that reasonably well enough when hand-coding that slapping a GUI code generator on top of it should be workable.

Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#193

Post by NuSkooler »

I used Delphi to create tons of both large apps and small utilities as a teenager. ...admittedly, I uh "creatively borrowed" the package then (couldn't even remotely afford it) and at the current price, I can see why people would continue to do that.

With that said, I'd really like to check out Lazarus the next time I need to create such a GUI utility or the like. ...and if the price wasn't crazy, I'd be very tempted to try Delphi for some projects again.

Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#194

Post by rodorgas »

jorgeleo wrote: post #150
bruno2223 wrote: post #47

I still compile a old project in Delphi 7 once every 3 months just to add 5 lines of code, and they pay me monthly for it. It's cheaper than porting the whole system to any other language. It is a project that I've built 8 years ago. Delphi was already a "strange think" on that time, it was declining fast. I think Java killed Delphi - "One codebase for all platforms, even your freezer will have Java!" - this was the…

"But I still miss the old days of drag-N-drop GUI of Delphi, really easy." How many years later and the web still does not catch up.

Web is much more advanced (and complex), and that's why you can't just drag and drop. Or can you? Remember Wix.

Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#195

Post by rootlocus »

jimbokun wrote: post #187
phatbyte wrote: post #176

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 so…

Was a different business model from a different time, making money directly off of selling good developer tools. Even Apple and Microsoft charged for their development tools until relatively recently, I believe. Now open source and vendor tools have completely won that space, and its only possible to profit from developer tools indirectly. So not just Delphi, but the entire associated business model has become irrele…

JetBrains makes the best developer tools I've used, and while they offer free, community licenses, their more advanced tools still require a paid subscription.

Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#196

Post by christophilus »

lasermike026 wrote: post #181

Why do people do this to themselves? You can't code in a vacuum. It's about community strength and modernity. If you don't have both you are wasting you time. It's like talking to a island cast away.

If everyone thought like this, there would never be a successful new language or platform. So, while we're bandying about subjective statements, I'll give mine: It's not about community strength and modernity. It's about exploring ideas and finding tools / solutions that work well for you and the problem you're trying to solve.

Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#197

Post by TimJYoung »

IshKebab wrote: post #188
wambotron wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is about community strength? If he's creating applications and enjoys doing it, why does it matter who else is using the same language? Worst case scenario, he can translate libraries from other languages into Object Pascal, but realistically it has a decent-sized community. I don't see the modernity point, either. Object Pascal has modern features.

It matters because it affects how many third party libraries are available and the number of other people that can understand and work on your code. Object Pascal may have modern features, but that doesn't mean it is a modern language - nobody is going to start learning it now. Only people that have known it for years already will use it.

Object Pascal is very similar to C# in many ways. It isn't like a developer that has used Java or C# would have a hard time learning and understanding how to use it.

Re: modern languages: a language having modern features isn't a modern language, rather how popular it is at this moment is the most important aspect ? How did that work out for Python ? And where does PHP land using this criteria ? Is PHP better than Object Pascal because more people write PHP code ?

Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#198

Post by cwyers »

mamcx wrote: post #184
dwc wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think any company that would buy Delphi will agree more with me than with you. If you're right and companies just can't see that or make it work, can the community do more with Lazarus? I have not played with that so I don't know how good it is.

Most companies will ruin any language, specially if you get into the idea that is for sell as in the 90s. No way this could work today. We (the community) have tell Borland and sub-sequent owners exactly what to do, and have been never been heared. To see why it failed, read : https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Borland-fail In the height of the enterprise transformation, I asked Del Yocam, one of many interim CEOs after K…

Because what you were telling them is wrong.

Look at every other Delphi competitor from the time period. Microsoft is giving Visual Studio away to casual users and Visual Basic is now VB.Net. Eclipse and IntelliJ come in free versions. There is no longer a market for a million loyal $100 customers for a programming language and ecosystem. There are too many high-quality free languages, compilers and IDEs to make that business model work anymore.

Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#199

Post by rootlocus »

lasermike026 wrote: post #181

Why do people do this to themselves? You can't code in a vacuum. It's about community strength and modernity. If you don't have both you are wasting you time. It's like talking to a island cast away.

> It's about community strength and modernity.

Javascript people have both and they suffer from "javascript fatigue".

Community strength is important and useful but it's by no means the reason people write software. Modernity is only useful if it solves problems. Otherwise it's just superfluous.

> If you don't have both you are wasting you time.

Perhaps you mean that you won't be able to boast your skills in interviews and apply at hip jobs? Perhaps that's true. However, enjoying yourself and making something useful isn't a waste of time.

Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#200

Post by jimbokun »

interfixus wrote: post #52
gaius wrote: post #35

Earlier 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.

I never stopped to consider how much of the world's software is written in a Dane-designed language.
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