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Why I Choose Delphi

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Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#251

Post by TMSZ »

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

I think Delphi Started has same limitation as C++ Builder Starter - removed most of debugging functionality (e.g. local variables window). It may be not critical with small applications, but I would rather have "no commercial", no 3rd party components or code size limitation than crippled IDE. I've tried to switch from Turbo C++ Explorer 2006 (this was also free version) to C++ Builder 10.1 Starter and I prefer old one.

Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#252

Post by badpenny »

Joeri wrote: post #233
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…

Also started Delphi at 14, now 37. Always had a soft spot for it, but Borland managed it into the ground, and the later owners never figured out a way to make it successful again, even though to this day it has a lot of unrealized market potential. I often think nostalgically back to my NT4 system. A full office suite, photoshop, and delphi IDE running side by side in 128 MB of RAM, with room to spare, and very zippy…

Hell, just optimising would be a start.

Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#253

Post by george_ciobanu »

rodorgas wrote: post #194
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.

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

Bubble.is is Delphi for the web, but better.

Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#254

Post by e12e »

nurettin wrote: post #133
e12e wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need for the .Net-runtime on target computer? Or more like a runnable jar-file that "only" depends on an installed jvm?

Yes, to prove, get any crack exe and run pexplore on it. Very likely you will see some Delphi dfm or list of units compiled into the constant area.

I think I misunderstood - I thought you meant there was a way to ship slim c# exe files.

Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#255

Post by TimJYoung »

bdamm wrote: post #236
TimJYoung wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In order to do a Delphi-like product for the web, you need to solve these problems: 1) JS isn't discoverable from the perspective of the IDE. There's no static typing and no way for the IDE to hook up code to UI elements, and vice-versa. You need a statically-typed language that can transpile to JS without too much "impedance mismatch". 2) HTML layout functionality isn't really geared for the type of layouts that are…

Your IDE looks cool especially for Object Pascal die-hards but your way wrong with JS. One doesn't need static typing to discover patterned functions. You need a convention and a parser that can recognize that convention.

Thanks.

Re: patterned functions: you can't rely on patterned functions in a full-featured IDE that allows any class method to be an event handler/delegate for another class instance. What you end up may look like what Delphi is doing, but it is just an approximation of the real thing that won't work very well for general-purpose usage. There's going to be all sorts of edge cases that don't work correctly because you can't get a reliable signature for a given method.

Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#256

Post by TimJYoung »

goatlover wrote: post #239
TimJYoung wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In order to do a Delphi-like product for the web, you need to solve these problems: 1) JS isn't discoverable from the perspective of the IDE. There's no static typing and no way for the IDE to hook up code to UI elements, and vice-versa. You need a statically-typed language that can transpile to JS without too much "impedance mismatch". 2) HTML layout functionality isn't really geared for the type of layouts that are…

Smalltalk was able to do #1 in the 70s without static types.

I'm not familiar enough with Smalltalk to comment, but I'm guessing that it had a formal, discoverable system of hooking events to event handlers. Was that the case ?

Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#257

Post by apta »

pjmlp wrote: post #159
Certhas wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. I did GUI programming with Delphi in high school, then haven't touched it till now, and I am somewhat shocked how the ability to create desktop (or web) GUIs today seems to lag so much behind how I remember Delphi. Might be nostalgia speaking, but even if it doesn't lag behind, I'm pretty sure it hasn't gotten better. I guess QT Creator actually comes close. (Plus: Compile times were never ever an issue..…

The majority of tools for native apps desktops and mobile OSes (minus deployment) still comes close to Delphi. Now for the web, nevermind.

I don't do desktop app dev, but what tools are there? I'm aware of .NET under Visual Studio and NetBeans UI designer.

Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#258

Post by tonyedgecombe »

striking wrote: post #175
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They aren't really Hypercard though are they.

Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#259

Post by WorldMaker »

frik wrote: post #242
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…

Delphi and VB4-6 used to be the RAD tools. (RAD = rapid application developed) One could drag and drop controls and create an GUI application in WYSIWYG-style. Then in 1999 when Microsoft abdomen VB for their new dotNet vision, MSFT was about to be split up, etc Web took over and Dreamweaver (and Frontpage) offered a similar IDE experience for HTML4 with a tables and PHP (or ASP, etc). To this day VB6 has the easiest…

You don't use the Start Menu in Windows 10 or the Settings application or the calculator or the WiFi menu or the Action Center or ...? UWP apps are more ubiquitous than you think they are in Windows 10. Zero times visited the Windows Store to directly install apps? Sure, that's possible. Actually using Zero UWP apps? Increasingly unlikely.

UWP isn't a failed experiment by most measures, and you may not directly notice the API transition in many major Windows components from Win32 to UWP, but it's happening.

For what it is worth, the RAD experience for UWP is pretty good and if you want to make a not-very-well-architected "VB6-ish code behind" app with Visual Studio RAD tools, you can knock it out in about the time it would have taken you in VB6.

Re: Why I Choose Delphi

#260

Post by computerex »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #209
computerex wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A GUI web site generator is trivial and many already exist. The difference between the web and traditional desktop based programs is that you have a lot more freedom in constructing the experience on the web. Whereas a typical WinForms app is made up of a bunch of drag and drop common controls like the button or text edit, simple text editing and buttons can take many different creative forms to best suit the intende…

> A GUI web site generator is trivial and many already exist. > older desktop based technologies like WinForms are more geared towards purely functional experiences. The web can go above and beyond providing merely functional experiences. Not talking about web sites here, but web apps, which in the modern sense are much more aligned with desktop apps than websites of old.

I meant web apps. Modern web apps offer a lot of freedom in constructing the precise experience we want the user to get. This is unlike traditional desktop applications with the cookie cutter controls that behave the same way from app to app.
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