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24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

blog.marcocantu.com

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Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#11

Post by dfox »

systems wrote: post #6

Embarcadero tools and ides, are super expensive considering that most developer tools are either free (visual studio developer is free for individuals), or way cheaper (jetbrains) I really dont know who their target customer is, but then again, when I look around, I find tools like windev (PC-Soft) and Clarion (softvelocity) have a loyal following Except of course that embarcadero, is way more expensive Free-pascal i…

Few years ago they obviously realized this and created free of charge "community" edition (IIRC it is licensed in the "it's free unless you make more than X with this" way, like Unreal Engine).

The target customers for the paid editions obviously are developers of custom line of bussines applications. And in that case the license cost is somewhat justified, as the IDE and it's libraries are essentially directly usable for that, while everyone developing similar things in notionally free of charge Visual Studio is going to buy DevExpress and ReSharper.

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#12

Post by kristianp »

teilo wrote: post #8
systems wrote: post #6

Embarcadero tools and ides, are super expensive considering that most developer tools are either free (visual studio developer is free for individuals), or way cheaper (jetbrains) I really dont know who their target customer is, but then again, when I look around, I find tools like windev (PC-Soft) and Clarion (softvelocity) have a loyal following Except of course that embarcadero, is way more expensive Free-pascal i…

Looking at their price / feature matrix, they are running this platform like it's still 1999. The cheapest option is outrageous, and has no client/server DB support. So that means spending at least $3,600 (on sale!) for a usable development platform. Batshit crazy.

It does seem strange in this day of cloud databases and connected everything, to differentiate their "Enterprise" product based on local vs remote databases[1]. A very outdated way to do things. I think Delphi has had that model since the 90s. On the other hand, they now have a Community edition that is free until your company reaches $5k in revenue.

[1] See: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/product-editions

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#14

Post by dfox »

protomyth wrote: post #2

Got to say, other than the font being much nicer now, some of those old screens look a whole lot better and easier to navigate. I miss buttons that look like buttons.

One interesting observation is that Delphi 1 copied the Word 6/Excel 4 "ctrl3d" UI style, but not quite exactly. Typical Delphi-ism are the Paradox-like (well, duh) tabs on bottom edge of the window, which look good as long as the window isn't modal dialog (compare the tabs on code editor window and on the project settings dialog). And another more subtle, but sure signal of Delphi 1 application are the black borders inside text fields (and then also TBitBtn, but that is another thing which in the 3.1 days looked reasonable and not totally ugly as it does in anything after windows 95).

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#15

Post by dfox »

kristianp wrote: post #12
teilo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at their price / feature matrix, they are running this platform like it's still 1999. The cheapest option is outrageous, and has no client/server DB support. So that means spending at least $3,600 (on sale!) for a usable development platform. Batshit crazy.

It does seem strange in this day of cloud databases and connected everything, to differentiate their "Enterprise" product based on local vs remote databases[1]. A very outdated way to do things. I think Delphi has had that model since the 90s. On the other hand, they now have a Community edition that is free until your company reaches $5k in revenue. [1] See: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/product-editio…

It is even more strange given the fact that the value of the database support is in the MVC-ish TDataSet/TDataSource/TDBWhatever framework which obviously comes even with the local edition and not in the database drivers, which truly suck and have better opensource replacements (and in reasonably large application get rewritten from scratch anyway)

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#16

Post by acqq »

dfox wrote: post #11
systems wrote: post #6

Embarcadero tools and ides, are super expensive considering that most developer tools are either free (visual studio developer is free for individuals), or way cheaper (jetbrains) I really dont know who their target customer is, but then again, when I look around, I find tools like windev (PC-Soft) and Clarion (softvelocity) have a loyal following Except of course that embarcadero, is way more expensive Free-pascal i…

Few years ago they obviously realized this and created free of charge "community" edition (IIRC it is licensed in the "it's free unless you make more than X with this" way, like Unreal Engine). The target customers for the paid editions obviously are developers of custom line of bussines applications. And in that case the license cost is somewhat justified, as the IDE and it's libraries are essentially directly usabl…

https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter

"If you're a small company or organization without revenue (or up to $5,000 per year in revenue), you can also use the Delphi Community Edition. Once your company's total revenue reaches US $5,000, or your team expands to more than 5 developers, you can move up to an unrestricted commercial license with Professional edition."

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#19

Post by dfox »

larrywright wrote: post #10

I remember you could always tell apps that were written in Delphi by the non-standard Ok/Cancel buttons with the icons.

TBitBtn ;)

In fact in Windows 95 and everything after it simply looks totaly out of place and the Delphi documentation tried hard to dissuade people from using that and instead presented some idea of what MS's HIG say (notice that Delphi 2 does not use TBitBtn anywhere and tries to match W95 UI style very hard, even more than Office 95), obviously for a long time it didn't really work.

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#20

Post by hnzix »

agumonkey wrote: post #7
protomyth wrote: post #2

Got to say, other than the font being much nicer now, some of those old screens look a whole lot better and easier to navigate. I miss buttons that look like buttons.

I have a weird feeling these days, that improvements didn't happen at the right place and that old GUI paradigms were just right and that if you knew how to leverage what a computer can do (mind you you could do sml and prolog back in the days) you wouldn't much fancier presentation..

> old GUI paradigms were just right

It's a permutation of "worse is better". Skeuomorphism and hierarchical organization cargo-culted as evil, ignoring that our traditional built environments work using these paradigms.

User-hostile design. Let's replace all buttons and text labels with arbitrary flat abstract icons! See also: nosql and SPAs.

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