Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

blog.marcocantu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 167 posts

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

#121

Post by wila »

acqq wrote: post #16
dfox wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

If your team is over 2 developers and you don't have a revenue of $5k then I don't think you will be in the market for long.

In other words, CE only caters to students and those will not invest their time in a dying platform if they are smart.

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

#122

Post by coldtea »

agumonkey wrote: post #120
coldtea wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Extreme skeumorphism a la Mac sometime ago is also undesirable, though Mac never had extreme skeumorphism. Extreme skeumorphism would be like the common case of DVD player apps made to look real-life DVD players (with all the frustrating LCD-like text displays and tiny cryptic buttons). It's not about having 3d looking buttons, or having faux-leather on your Notes app, which are the kinds of things Apple did.

faux-leather falls into abusive skeu IMO

The bad skeuomorphism is about replicating physical world design and constraints in digital apps -- and thus imposing constraints that don't exist in the digital world.

Merely looking like a physical product (but with interactivity that takes advantage of what the digital world affords) is not the skeuomorphism people complained about.

One might like or not like faux-leather, for example, but that's just an aesthetic preference (and those things come in circles, in 10-15 years it could be all skeuomorphism in vogue again, as a backlash against too minimal / plain vanilla designs).

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

#124

Post by Narishma »

I don't know if it's just me but what I noticed right away in those screenshots is that the older Windows 3.1 interface is much easier on the eye that the modern one. You can easily tell what's clickable and what's not, the contrast is good, the fonts and colors are consistent. All that while using a fraction of the resources.

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

#125

Post by FranciscusG »

chadcmulligan wrote: post #82

I've been a Delphi developer off and on for 20+ years (since 2, though dabbled with 1). A lot of people focus on the object pascal and it is dated as a language, though the latest is catching up. The IDE has problems now and then with code completion - it pauses a lot and sometimes just stops working, if you come from Visual Studio or XCode this is incomprehensible and annoying. Where Delphi shines is the VCL - the V…

Delphi shines in so many ways - I tried to develop something in Go but I hit a brick wall with a sub-par editor (Visual Studio Code), all kinds of restrictions, no way to make halfway acceptable GUI apps, a slow runtime, a slow compiler, unacceptable formatting rules, totally hopeless. Rust has even worse issues. I considered C, C++, Java and PHP 7.3 but I'm basically forced into using Delphi again for a new major project.

I'd rather not use Delphi, since it's hard to find developers for it and investors won't like it. But there just aren't better or even acceptable alternatives for the type of development I do (3rd wave AI, building a graph database from scratch, processing TB's of data, dynamic visualisations etc.)

So the plan is to build all this unique functionality with Delphi and then, when I have something sellable, perhaps get it rewritten in Rust or something, when those tools have become better.

Even though I'm an old fogie and highly experienced with Delphi, I also do embedded dev. in C and have done so for decades, plus I recently built an enterprise-level PHP online store from scratch. I've been a vocal critic of Delphi for decades as well (even banned on Embarcadero's forums) and in 2019, I do not know of anything that compares to Delphi...

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

#126

Post by giancarlostoro »

amenod wrote: post #85
Svip wrote: post #67

For almost 11 years now, I've been working professionally with Delphi. And it would be wrong to say it's been a smooth ride. There's nothing wrong - per say - with Object Pascal. Or rather, it's not worse than C++, but Delphi - i.e. the library and IDE - is what's lacking behind. It was definitely cutting edge in the mid-90s, but it has not managed to keep with the times. Most Delphi developers rely on Indy, a third…

I think the $1000 price tag is totally wrong. I would never pay that kind of money for an IDE unless it was _really_ better than anything else. But this means: - the language has huge community (so I'm not stuck with a dying language) - it allows me to do anything (huge extensibility) Unfortunately it is difficult to change the pricing model once you have existing clients. On one hand they are the only ones paying fo…

I mean companies pay that and more to become Microsoft shops, at least before .NET Core and Visual Studio Code, and this isn'. I agree entirely with you. I would love to learn Delphi from a hobbyist perspective, can I get a license for like $299 or around that range? No? Hell why isn't there a freebie edition anymore.

Except, I can get all of Visual Studio for free for Community use, and yet I can't get a completely free edition of Delphi. I think I got a trial, and it failed to compile / run certain projects. It was basically crippleware for me, I couldn't get it to do a damn thing for a number of the projects it generated code for. I will say though, the IDE is fast as hell and it was a very tiny install.

I also would of loved them to have somewhat teamed up with the FPC group to make it so Delphi compiles for Linux in exchange for either monetary support for the FPC group, or enhancements that would make their compiler awesome.

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

#127

Post by giancarlostoro »

Svip wrote: post #88
amenod wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the $1000 price tag is totally wrong. I would never pay that kind of money for an IDE unless it was _really_ better than anything else. But this means: - the language has huge community (so I'm not stuck with a dying language) - it allows me to do anything (huge extensibility) Unfortunately it is difficult to change the pricing model once you have existing clients. On one hand they are the only ones paying fo…

The pricing model is the main reason newer people are not getting into Delphi. This is why they tried to lure people with iOS and Android capabilities. But when there are alternatives that are free, why bother? Yes, Delphi has a Community Edition now (which is free), but the fact that are excluded from a large portion of the library, because you cannot afford it, is always going to alienate some people. And it is alw…

Their community edition is kind of a joke when compared to Microsoft's VS Community Edition which basically brings everything.

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

#128

Post by cannam »

robocat wrote: post #87

We use Delphi, because we are productive with it, but it is seriously sorry. Yes, you can develop 64 bit apps with it, but the IDE is still a 32 bit app, which causes problems with large projects. The Indy components (e.g. http) are unsafe and shitty. Personally I don't think there is much to recommend.

> the IDE is still a 32 bit app

So is Visual Studio, for what it's worth.

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

#129

Post by orzig »

Narishma wrote: post #124

I don't know if it's just me but what I noticed right away in those screenshots is that the older Windows 3.1 interface is much easier on the eye that the modern one. You can easily tell what's clickable and what's not, the contrast is good, the fonts and colors are consistent. All that while using a fraction of the resources.

Related: Does anyone else remember the "How to use a mouse" programs on early Macs?

https://gizmodo.com/heres-how-a-macintosh-tutorial-taught-pe...

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

#130

Post by daaharper »

I'd pick Delphi over WPF/Winforms any day. Better cross-platform options, vector-based graphics via FMX, or traditional Windows graphics via the VCL. COM programming couldn't be easier. Performance is good, lots of components readily available, and finally Object Pascal is a joy to program in. Compilation speed comparable to a C# build.
Post reply on HN