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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

#101

Post by askvictor »

philpem wrote: post #93

I have so many fond memories of putting together quick apps with Delphi "back in the day". Every now and again I'd buy a copy of PC Plus magazine just because they had Delphi 1, 2 or 3 on the cover CD. I really miss the RAD concept, and I'd love to find a modern tool which had that aspect of Delphi, though perhaps with C++ or Python as a backing language. I know there's Lazarus (opensource Delphi), but it's C++Builde…

Anvil (http://anvil.works) is the closest thing I've come across to Delphi in the modern age. It's python, and it's webapps, but it's stupidly quick and easy (and fun) to get something working.

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

#102

Post by sifoobar »

I started working professionally in Delphi around 1998, and then spent 13 years evolving and maintaining a sprawling 2+ mloc reservation system.

They had a great thing going around that time, but then the pivoting and squeezing started. Instead of evolution we got enterprices, buzzwords and bit rot. By Delphi7, I'd say it was already as good as dead.

All owners so far share an unfortunate tendency to oversell half-baked solutions with no future, all the way up until the point where they pivot and push a brand new successor with no future while deprecating the previous attempt asap.

Their database, Interbase; was open source for about a month. Until the suits realized that no one would buy their shiny enterprice crap if they could simply download it for free, and it was closed again asap. Only now all the people who knew anything had joined effort in a fork called FirebirdSQL.

It was even released for Linux under the name Kylix, free for non-commercial use if I remember correctly. Until Microsoft bullied them into dropping the cross-platform game right now in return for cozy time with the centerfold creep and his side kick sweaty monkey. I just threw up a little in my mouth writing that so I'll stop here.

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

#103

Post by marcocantu »

Svip wrote: post #98
marcocantu wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Delphi has a Community Edition now (which is free), but the fact that are excluded from a large portion of the library" That's not really the case. With Delphi Community edition you get support for 4 operating systems, VCL and FireMonkey, it only lacks access to Enterprise databases like Oracle and some of the multi-tier architectures. Community has a large percentage (80%+) of the features...

You are correct, saying 'large portion of the library' was a mistake. But as I remember, you don't have access to the VCL source code with the Community Edition. The feature matrix says that this is 'limited in Community', whatever that means. We wanted to do MongoDB connections, which comes with FireDAC. But that's only available in the Enterprise Edition. So we ended up rewriting TMongoWire[0] to fit our needs. I a…

You are right about MongoDB... as for "VCL source code" it is available, but with licensing limitations

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

#105

Post by gg82 »

In Australia we have the Australian Delphi Users Group. We are having a conference next month.

https://www.adug.org.au/meetings/symposiums/2019-symposium/

It will have a range of topics including showing how to borrow some techniques from other languages and showing how to use some of the new functionality in the latest releases.

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

#106

Post by m0zg »

pjmlp wrote: post #71
m0zg wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then Hejlsberg left for MS and took his toys with him. WinForms bore more than a passing resemblance to VCL, and C# more than a passing resemblance to Delphi/C++ Builder. Good for MS to recognize true talent when they see it. Though their current API situation is still a mess: they can't stop screwing with it. But their .NET situation is as good as it's ever been.

Actually the way he went took a bit of talking with former work colleges then working at Microsoft. "Anders Hejlsberg: A craftsman of computer language" - interview https://behindthetech.libsynpro.com/001-anders-hejlsberg-a-c... WinForms was based on J++'s Windows Foundation Classes (WFC), Hejlsberg's first project at Microsoft. Which of course, was based on VCL. That mess is the usual DevDiv vs WinDev, for example I…

I do miss near-instantaneous builds on late 90's hardware (!). Much of that was Pascal with its single pass compiler. Productivity-wise that was indispensable.

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

#107

Post by softgrow »

richard_todd wrote: post #35

It’s weird that the project options dialog still offers to work around the Pentium FDIV bug. Are any of the current compile targets still afflicted? Like, can 2019 Delphi still compile me a win95 pentium binary?

I found it quite amusing to see that still there too. Unless you have an affected Pentium 100 (or slower) you won't have an issue. A poster on StackOverflow (2014) https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24101125/pentium-safe-fd... raises the issue too, arguing it is safer to leave the option in (which is by default off).

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

#108

Post by Leace »

Delphi was my first exposure to a real programming language almost 20 years ago. I'm very glad that it was it as I look upon the landscape of software engineering nowadays and it's totally opaque to beginners.

Delphi has right abstractions in a right place - you designed the form in a easy GUI and filled in methods with your code [0].

Why it was that way? Because it was designed to be simple and it worked (no need for Bret Victor's magic). (There was a blog of former Delphi developer that explained their thought process)

For the record I worked professionally in JavaScript (TypeScript) (backend and frontend), Java (Kotlin), C# and Ruby. I also did small chunks of support code in C/C++, Rust, Red/Rebol, Python, PHP, Go, Prolog and Lua.

If I wanted to teach kids programming today, something easy to understand but at the same sufficiently complex I'd probably choose Delphi (Lazarus looks like Delphi 5/7 from screenshots).

[0]: manual memory management was harder than GC but on the other hand it thought a lesson...

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

#109

Post by cubano »

What I remember most fondly about the Borland stack was how well it abstracted away all the messy Windows 3.x and 95 UI code and made working professionally as a Windows dev much less stressful.

Also, for a time, it totally blew away MS Visual C, although the VCL was hella inconsistent, and that was rather maddening at times.

To be at max productivity you had to scour the web looking for snippets that showed you how to, say, add strings to this widget or draw on that canvas.

The RAD implementation was rather brilliant, and for several years at least blew its main competitor, Visual Basic (ugh) totally out of the water.

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